I don't miss the em dash. Take away my hyphen and I'll be angry; but replacing em dashes with semicolons was personal policy since high school.
How do you indicate an interjection with semicolons?
I miss using em dashes
131–140 of 167 posts
Re: I miss using em dashes
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
> this supposed ability of determining whether or not content is AI-generated doesn't exist. It seems like you’re just wrong here? Em dashes aside, the ‘style’ of llm generated text is pretty distinct, and is something many people are able to distinguish.
No, I'm not wrong. Someone could easily write in the default output style of ChatGPT by hand (which will probably become increasingly common the longer that style remains in place), and someone could easily collaborate with ChatGPT on writing that looks nothing like what you're thinking. If organizations like schools are going to rely on tools that claim to detect AI-generated text with a useful level of reliability,…
Okay, you’re right that the LLM writing style isn’t singularly producible by LLM’s. However, I’m not sure why this writing style would become increasingly common? I don’t see why people would mimic text that is seen as low quality or associated with academic dishonesty.
Additionally, I do think it is valuable to determine if a piece of text is valuable, or more precisely, what I’m looking for. As others have said, if I want info from a LLM about a subject, it is trivial for me to get that. Oftentimes I am looking for text written by people though.
Re: I miss using em dashes
#133The article seems to misuse en-dashes in place of hyphens. Perhaps it's just the font, but for a largely graphical difference, that matters.
Anyway, I've used em- and en-dashes for a long time now (had it built into keyboard layout on "3rd level", AltGr+key), and not going to stop now.
Re: I miss using em dashes
#134I 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…
Provenance matters because LLM writing is cheap compared to actually having to think about what to say. I only have a limited amount of time to read. Skipping someone's Internet comment because it looks like spam often means I get to engage with something else.
I don't see that provenance matters per se. LLM-assisted writing is comparatively cheaper than producing the same writing without an LLM, but not inherently cheap in absolute terms.
If someone who typically bills $500/hr spends 30 - 60 minutes on a comment or blog post, that's still $250 - 500 worth of their time invested regardless of whether or not an LLM was involved. An LLM is comparatively cheaper than hiring a human editor or research assistant, but it's not negative cost.
Likewise, prompting ChatGPT with "write a blog post about bees" may be cheaper than hiring someone off Fiverr to respond to the exact same prompt, but in either case the resulting content will be low-value (yet still higher-value than the string "write a blog post about bees") because its source material was cheap. The fact that the latter version would have been written by a human is incidental.
Re: I miss using em dashes
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, I'm not wrong. Someone could easily write in the default output style of ChatGPT by hand (which will probably become increasingly common the longer that style remains in place), and someone could easily collaborate with ChatGPT on writing that looks nothing like what you're thinking. If organizations like schools are going to rely on tools that claim to detect AI-generated text with a useful level of reliability,…
Okay, you’re right that the LLM writing style isn’t singularly producible by LLM’s. However, I’m not sure why this writing style would become increasingly common? I don’t see why people would mimic text that is seen as low quality or associated with academic dishonesty. Additionally, I do think it is valuable to determine if a piece of text is valuable, or more precisely, what I’m looking for. As others have said, if…
However, I’m not sure why this writing style would become increasingly common?
I was basing that on a few factors, off the top of my head:
1. Someone might pick up mannerisms while using LLMs to help learn a new language, similarly to how an old friend of mine from Germany spoke English with an Australian accent because of where she learned English.
2. Lonely or asocial people who spend too much time with LLMs might subconsciously pick up habits from them.
3. Generation Beta will never have known a world without LLMs. It's not that difficult to imagine that ChatGPT will be a major formative influence on many of them.
As others have said, if I want info from a LLM about a subject, it is trivial for me to get that.
Sure, it's trivial for anyone to look up a simple fact. It's not so trivial for you to spend an hour deep-diving into a subject with an LLM and manually fact-checking information it provides before eventually landing on an LLM-generated blurb that provides exactly the information you were looking for. It's also not trivial for you to reproduce the list of detailed hand-written bullet points that someone might have provided as source material for an LLM to generate a first draft.
Re: I miss using em dashes
#136Now we also have an xkcd for this:
> not chatgpt output—i'm just like this.
> https://xkcd.com/3126/ — Disclaimer
Re: I miss using em dashes
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because the false positive rate is unacceptably high — we're talking about a standard, widely used character — and because if the heuristic becomes widespread enough to matter, then it will be trivially circumvented by bad actors anyway. Who is it helping if we collectively bully ourselves into excising a perfectly good punctuation mark from human language? If anything, I'd rather that renderers like Markdown just al…
Oh no, I'm not advocating ditching em-dahses. I love them -- the form I use, anyway. I was just curious why you've decided paying attention to them is a bad heuristic. Sure, it can change once people instruct their LLMs not to use them, but still, for now, they sure seem to overuse them! That and "let's unpack this". I swear, I'll forbid ChatGPT from using "unpack" ever again, in any context!
That's fair. It's not like I don't pay attention to it myself. It's more that I wouldn't never use presence of em dashes in the absence of any other heuristics to predict whether or not something is LLM-generated, and it's a practically useless signal either way because I also wouldn't assume that content that used hyphens in place of dashes wasn't LLM-generated.
So the only real purpose of the heuristic is to add a tiny extra vote of confidence when I see a comment that otherwise appears to be lazy ChatGPT copypasta, but in such cases I'll predict that it was probably LLM output either way, and I'll judge that it appears to be poor writing that isn't worth my time regardless of whether or not an LLM was involved.
Fundamentally, the issue I'm seeing here is that we're all talking over each other because we need a better standardized term than "LLM output". I suppose "slop" could work if we universally that it referred only to a subset of LLM output, rather than being synonymous with LLM output in general, but I'm not sure that we do universally agree on that.
If someone types the equivalent of a Google search into ChatGPT, or a spammer has an automated process generically reply to social media posts/comments, that's what qualifies to me as "slop". Most of us here have seen it in the wild by now, and there's obviously a distinctive common style (at least for now), and I think we can all agree that it sucks. That's very different from someone investing time and/or expertise to produce content that just happens to involve an LLM as one of the tools in their arsenal; the attitude it isn't is just the modern equivalent of considering cellular phone calls or typed letters to be "impersonal".
I'm not suggesting that LLM output doesn't tend to have a higher density of em dashes than human output. I'm just pushing back on the idea that presence of em dashes is sufficient evidence to dismiss something as probably-LLM-generated, which is no better than superstition. I mean, I've used em dashes in a number of comments in this thread, and no one has accused me of using an LLM, so it can't be a pattern that anyone puts too much stock in.
Re: I miss using em dashes
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Honestly it is currently _good enough_. It's obviously imperfect, like ~all heuristics, but its false positive rate should be fairly low.
Re: I miss using em dashes
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
Okay, you’re right that the LLM writing style isn’t singularly producible by LLM’s. However, I’m not sure why this writing style would become increasingly common? I don’t see why people would mimic text that is seen as low quality or associated with academic dishonesty. Additionally, I do think it is valuable to determine if a piece of text is valuable, or more precisely, what I’m looking for. As others have said, if…
However, I’m not sure why this writing style would become increasingly common? I was basing that on a few factors, off the top of my head: 1. Someone might pick up mannerisms while using LLMs to help learn a new language, similarly to how an old friend of mine from Germany spoke English with an Australian accent because of where she learned English. 2. Lonely or asocial people who spend too much time with LLMs might…
This is all future concerns; if it happens, then people can change their heuristics. There's no point trying to predict all possible futures in everything that you do.
Re: I miss using em dashes
#140I 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…
> A year ago the red flag du jour was "delve" "delve" was a red flag 650 years ago! When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman? — Fr John Ball's sermon addressing the rebels of the Peasant's Revolt, 1381
Always wondered a bit about that one; both mining and spinning seems weirdly high-tech for Adam and Eve.