Makes me wonder the ratio between LLM commenters versus those aligning with an LLMs syntax.
Not sure which is scarier
New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes
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Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes
#222— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — Don’t mind me, just skewing the results. — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — results. — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —…
Haha, the code counts the number of comments with em-dashes and similar, not the number of em-dashes total. Could be an argument made for aggregating by user instead however, if some bots are found to be particularly active and skewing the data.
> Haha, the code counts the number of comments with em-dashes and similar
Shhh!
:)
Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes
#223I'm still salty that I can't use em-dashes anymore for fear of my writing being flagged as AI generated. Been using them for years—it's just `alt+shift+-` on a Mac keyboard and I find them more legible in many fonts compared to the simple dash on the typical numpad. It's so sad to me that good typographical conventions have been co-opted by the zeitgeist of LLMs.
LLM fatigue is real. It's not just em-dash — it's the overall tone of the writing that clues people in. But if your viewpoints and approach are unique, your typesetting won't raise suspicion of machine-generation, except in the most dull of readers. Just be you and it will be fine. If you'd like more tips on writing I'd be happy to help.
You, sir, are evil. I mean that in the most complementary of manners.
Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes
#224Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes
#225Something about correlation and causation of magic gotcha signals. Text may appear generated to a reader but there's no smoking gun evidence that can disambiguate fact from hypothesis. Even intuition isn't evidence.
Perhaps there needs to be some sort of voluntary ethical disclosure practice to disclaim text as AI-generated with some sort of unusual signifiers. „Lower double quotes perhaps?„
Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
What motivation is there to use AI to astroturf (if that's what this is) like this? Is it ideological? Is it product marketing in those relevant threads where someone is showcasing? Or is it pure technical testing, playing around?
In some cases, it's probably to establish aged accounts that are more trusted by users and spam algorithms. There's a market for old Reddit accounts, for example.
Yup, reddit is awash in established accounts that suddenly start spamming. Whole pools of them working to the same goal at times.
Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes
#227Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes
#228I wonder if some people here considered me ai at some point
Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
The issue is that LLMs adopt a very particular style that is a mix of being very polished (em-dash, lists-of-three, etc) that is reminiscent of marketing copy, and some quirks picked up from the humans curating the training data somewhere in Africa If AI was writing like everyone else we wouldn't be talking about this. But instead it writes like a subset of people write, many of them just some of the time as a consci…
I think this is interesting in that I feel, grammatically and structurally, LLMs often generate _higher quality_ text than most humans do. What tends to be lower quality is the meaning of said texts. Say what you want about marketing-isms of your typical LLM, they have been trained and often succeed at making legible, easy to scan blobs of text. I suspect if more LLM spam was curated/touched up, most people would be…
I mean, yes, LLMs write grammatically perfect, well-structured English (and many other languages prevalent in their training sets). That's exactly why many people are now suspicious of anyone who writes neat, professional-style English on the internet.
Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes
#230One pattern I've noticed recently is sort of formulaic comments that look okish on their own, maybe a bit abstract/vague/bland, and not taking a particular side on good/bad in the way people like to do, but really obviously AI when you look at the account history and they're all the same formula: >this is [summary] >not just x, it's y >punchy ending, maybe question Once you know it's AI it's very obvious they told it…
That's not true, it's false