I'm not sure why people let others change them. I keep punctuating like it's the 20th Century.
I miss using em dashes
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Re: I miss using em dashes
#12People over-update when they see an em-dash. If you compute the posterior probability, you'll realize that seeing an em-dash hardly shifts the probability that text is AI generated.
“Over-update”? Do you mean “overreact”?
No, I mean over-update in a Bayesian capacity. As in, they are updating their prior probability using evidence to arrive at the posterior probability.
Re: I miss using em dashes
#13I'm now using em dashes more out of spite, since my writing is too weird for people to claim it's AI generated so any use of them must be legitimate.
Re: I miss using em dashes
#14These days it almost feels like a breach of etiquette not to tell ChatGPT to avoid em dashes, otherwise it’s immediately obvious the text was generated by GPT.
If people hate the thing so much that you have to go so far out of your way to disguise it, maybe the breach of etiquette is using the thing.
Re: I miss using em dashes
#15Continue using emdashes and trust your audience.
Re: I miss using em dashes
#16Now that AI has ruined the emdash for punctuation enthusiasts like us... I've been thinking of switching to the double emdash (⸺) and worst case, fellow humans, there's always the triple: ⸻
The triple is kind of hilarious. Really emphasizes the pause
Re: I miss using em dashes
#17[deleted]
Re: I miss using em dashes
#18I suspect that at least in part, the fad in the AI community of using all-lowercase is to make sure that their writing can't be mistaken for LLM-generated output.
Sam Altman more than anyone else popularised this style and for a while every thrid or fourth comment on any AI-related topic was all lowercase.
Re: I miss using em dashes
#19I wouldn't worry about it. A year ago the red flag du jour was "delve"; this year it's em dashes; next year it'll be something else. In any case, this is a very online topic that I assume only a vocal minority are hung up on in the first place. If you picked a random person off the street and asked for their thoughts on em dashes, you'd probably get a blank stare.
Eventually, as models and their users both improve, we'll collectively realize that trying to reliably discriminate between AI and human writing is no different than reading tea leaves. We should judge content based on its intrinsic value, not its provenance. We should call each other out for poor writing or inaccurate information — not because if we squint we can pick out some loose correlations with ChatGPT's default output style.
Consciously trying not to "sound like an LLM" while writing is like consciously trying not to think about the fact that you're currently breathing, or consciously trying to sound like a cool guy.