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It's Not Just X. It's Y

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21–30 of 155 posts

Re: It's Not Just X. It's Y

#21
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Hyphen functioning as an em dash" is an expected human thing as it's what's easy to type. It's specifically an actual em dash which got bulldozed, much to the dismay of those who bothered to put the unicode character in.

A lot of the LLM bots on HN (and elsewhere) will find-and-replace their em dashes with hypens in an attempt to evade detection.

Precisely, anything to remove AI smells in favor of natural looking text.

Re: It's Not Just X. It's Y

#22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Hyphen functioning as an em dash" is an expected human thing as it's what's easy to type. It's specifically an actual em dash which got bulldozed, much to the dismay of those who bothered to put the unicode character in.

I prefer the double dash "--", but Microsoft products will convert this to a proper em-dash if you press space afterwards, I think...

Double should map to endash, tripple for em.

Re: It's Not Just X. It's Y

#23
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of the LLM bots on HN (and elsewhere) will find-and-replace their em dashes with hypens in an attempt to evade detection.

Precisely, anything to remove AI smells in favor of natural looking text.

My point is I don't consider em dash vs hyphen to be a strong signal either way, humans and bots alike use both interchangeably.

Re: It's Not Just X. It's Y

#24

I like that these AI idioms exist. They're like watermarks for text. It's worth the cost of humans avoiding them. Companies will eventually train their models to be undetectable, but society would be better if they didn't.

Except that the entire point of the article is that they're not AI idioms. They're not "watermarks for text." They're legitimate language constructions that LLMs tend to overuse, but that real humans also use. Real humans do, in fact, say "align with" all the time, just as often as "corresponds."

And you can pry my em dashes from my cold, dead hands.

Re: It's Not Just X. It's Y

#28

I like that these AI idioms exist. They're like watermarks for text. It's worth the cost of humans avoiding them. Companies will eventually train their models to be undetectable, but society would be better if they didn't.

> It's worth the cost of humans avoiding them

That's really unfortunate though. It's like Michael Bolton from Office Space: "No way! Why should I change? He's the one who sucks."

Re: It's Not Just X. It's Y

#29

I like that these AI idioms exist. They're like watermarks for text. It's worth the cost of humans avoiding them. Companies will eventually train their models to be undetectable, but society would be better if they didn't.

Except that the entire point of the article is that they're not AI idioms. They're not "watermarks for text." They're legitimate language constructions that LLMs tend to overuse, but that real humans also use . Real humans do, in fact, say "align with" all the time, just as often as "corresponds." And you can pry my em dashes from my cold, dead hands.

Well reading between the lines I don’t think they’re saying all of those uses are AI. They’re legitimate constructs, like the em-dash, en-dash, and hyphen, all of which I used to use regularly. But now they’re AI tells so I use them sparingly.

Re: It's Not Just X. It's Y

#30
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Precisely, anything to remove AI smells in favor of natural looking text.

My point is I don't consider em dash vs hyphen to be a strong signal either way, humans and bots alike use both interchangeably.

A signal is not the same thing as a guarantee. Both of your points so far, i.e. your provided text & that bots often bother to replace em dashes to avoid detection, actually support that it is a signal though.
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