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I miss using em dashes

bassi.li

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Re: I miss using em dashes

#91

Post by gerdesj »

There is rather more to type than the em dash, kicking off with the difference between say a typeface and a font (or fount). Why not get into leading and kerning and the other stuff? Widows and orphans anyone?

Getting your knickers in a twist over a minor typographical construction is rather contrived as an indicator of a non human author of a text. It will do for now but won't tomorrow.

I can mostly spot LLM output on sight but I can be fooled. I never use silly rules like "em-dash => LLM". That's just silly.

Re: I miss using em dashes

#92

Post by buu700 »

dgfitz wrote: post #60
buu700 wrote: post #19

I 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, w…

> Eventually, as models and their users both improve I like how this is presented as a given thing that will happen, that models are going to just improve forever. That there isn’t some plateau on “user skill with LLMs” like it’s fucking calculus mixed with rocket science that only the elite users will ever attain full fluency in using. This is starting to read like religious cult propaganda, which is probably scarie…

Are you implying that it's impossible to attain greater proficiency with LLM usage than one would have on their first day opening ChatGPT? The concepts of "Google-fu" and "tech literacy" must also be alien to you.

Re: I miss using em dashes

#93

Post by bee_rider »

campbel wrote: post #28
buu700 wrote: post #19

I 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, w…

100%. I use em-dashes a decent amount and plan to continue. If someone wants to incorrectly assume it was AI writing so be it.

I use them occasionally and have never been falsely accused of being an LLM.

The stakes are a bit different for students unfortunately, who who’ll have their writing passed through some snake oil AI detector arbitrarily. This is unfortunate because “learning how not to trigger an AI detector” is a totally useless skill.

Generally, I don’t think we need AI detection. We need dumb bullshit detection. Humans and LLMs can both generate that. If people can use an LLM in a way that doesn’t generate dumb bullshit, I’m happy to read it.

Re: I miss using em dashes

#94

Post by shoobiedoo »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #53

No offense to any em-dash lovers, but I think an overuse of em-dashes indicates that your writing is probably slop, just not AI slop, human slop. In a sense, there is a kind of slop that relies on em-dashes to glue things together - usually in a cliche way, learned from lazy journalists copy-pasting from their last article to add a bit of spice to their writing - and AI just copied it. (On the other hand, maybe it's…

Maybe. I fell in love with them after reading Death on the Installment Plan by Celine, where he crams every sentence with them (and sequences of periods that have a similar effect). I found out later that he purposefully did that as a jab at Proust's writing where he did the exact opposite-- sentences a page and a half long with only commas and parenthesis.

Re: I miss using em dashes

#95

Post by buu700 »

dawnerd wrote: post #56
buu700 wrote: post #19

I 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, w…

It’s not even just em dashes, it’s the same style posts people make that match with how chatgpt talks with simple prompts.

Right, but that's bad writing because it's awkward to read and/or overly cliched. The fact that it may have been AI-generated is incidental. It would still be bad writing if someone happened to write in the exact same style by hand.

Re: I miss using em dashes

#97

Post by upghost »

hodgesrm wrote: post #86

Given the chaos currently infecting the world, overuse of em dashes--or any use for that matter--is the last thing a rational being should worry over. Other than splitting infinitives and ending sentences with a preposition, of course. They are a weighty burden no soul should have to ever put up with.

Often terribly written, I am likewise concerned with dangling participles.

Re: I miss using em dashes

#98

Post by shmerl »

anon84873628 wrote: post #83
shmerl wrote: post #23

What's wrong with em dashes? Use whatever you like. Compose --- should produce — For en dash it's Compose --. produces – Not all fonts show the difference though.

The article wasn't really about that...

Suggestion that humans don't use symbols like em dash is based on the possible difficulty to use them. The reason is probably because many never used / heard of the Compose key. It's not hard to do it once you learn about it.

Re: I miss using em dashes

#99

Post by lmm »

buu700 wrote: post #78
lmm wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. There are zillions of words produced every second, your time is the most valuable resource you have, and actually existing LLM output (as opposed to some theo…

Putting aside the claim that "LLM output [...] is almost always not worth reading"[1], the whole issue here is that this supposed ability of determining whether or not content is AI-generated doesn't exist. Is it really a valuable life skill to decide whether or not you want to read something based solely on its density of em dashes? Of course there are cases where you can tell that some text is almost certainly LLM…

> Is it really a valuable life skill to decide whether or not you want to read something based solely on its density of em dashes?

Having good heuristics to make quick judgements is a valuable life skill. If you don't, you're going to get swamped.

> Would any of that somehow be more worth reading if the author posted a video of themselves carefully typing it up by hand?

No, but the volume of carefully hand-typed junk is more manageable. Compare with spam: Individually written marketing emails might be just as worthless as machine-generated mass mailings, but the latter is what's going to fill up your inbox if you can't filter it out.

> If LLM output were never worth reading, ChatGPT would have no users.

Only if all potential users were wise. Plenty of people waste their time and money in all sorts of ways.

Re: I miss using em dashes

#100

Post by buu700 »

lmm wrote: post #99
buu700 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Putting aside the claim that "LLM output [...] is almost always not worth reading"[1], the whole issue here is that this supposed ability of determining whether or not content is AI-generated doesn't exist. Is it really a valuable life skill to decide whether or not you want to read something based solely on its density of em dashes? Of course there are cases where you can tell that some text is almost certainly LLM…

> Is it really a valuable life skill to decide whether or not you want to read something based solely on its density of em dashes? Having good heuristics to make quick judgements is a valuable life skill. If you don't, you're going to get swamped. > Would any of that somehow be more worth reading if the author posted a video of themselves carefully typing it up by hand? No, but the volume of carefully hand-typed junk…

Having good heuristics is a valuable life skill. Presence of standard punctuation is not a good heuristic.
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