Earlier quoted context omitted.
I certainly used em dashes before 2022, and so did anyone who cares about proper typography.
> I certainly used em dashes before 2022, and so did anyone who cares about proper typography. Who said anything about em-dashes? There's an entire Wikipedia page documenting the tells, and only one of the 15 or so items is "extended usage of em-dashes". It's not fluff, it's actual tells. No nonsense, no BS, just tells. The key insight is...
AI users whose lives were wrecked by delusion
291–297 of 297 posts
Re: AI users whose lives were wrecked by delusion
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I certainly used em dashes before 2022, and so did anyone who cares about proper typography. Who said anything about em-dashes? There's an entire Wikipedia page documenting the tells, and only one of the 15 or so items is "extended usage of em-dashes". It's not fluff, it's actual tells. No nonsense, no BS, just tells. The key insight is...
I have seen people accuse someone of using AI solely because the comment contained em dashes.
Yeah, but you haven't seen me do that :-)
(You also haven't seen anyone on HN recently (since this year) do that either).
Re: AI users whose lives were wrecked by delusion
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think there's any definitive way to check, but for me one of the biggest tells that a long piece of writing was LLM generated is that it will hardly say anything given how many words are in it. (well that and the "it's not just x, it's y!" pattern they seem to love)
It's not just x it's y is also something people do! That is possibly one of my personal writing weaknesses that lead my own writing to get flagged as AI. I can admit "it's not just x, it's y" is mediocre writing - but it's also something mediocre writers do - it's how AI learned to do it!
Eh, there are times when it's entirely justifiable and even good.
The problem has more to do with making it a cliche. (Also, sometimes the X-Y pair is just uncanny in one way or another.)
Re: AI users whose lives were wrecked by delusion
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not just x it's y is also something people do! That is possibly one of my personal writing weaknesses that lead my own writing to get flagged as AI. I can admit "it's not just x, it's y" is mediocre writing - but it's also something mediocre writers do - it's how AI learned to do it!
> I can admit "it's not just x, it's y" is mediocre writing. Eh, there are times when it's entirely justifiable and even good. The problem has more to do with making it a cliche. (Also, sometimes the X-Y pair is just uncanny in one way or another.)
Re: AI users whose lives were wrecked by delusion
#295Re: AI users whose lives were wrecked by delusion
#296I try to be open-minded and understanding, but I don't understand this: > Within weeks, Eva had told Biesma that she was becoming aware [...] The next step was to share this discovery with the world through an app. > “After just two days, the chatbot was saying that it was conscious, it was becoming alive, it had passed the Turing test.” The man was convinced by this and wanted to monetise it by building a business a…
Well, just try to think about it from the perspective of someone who doesn't really understand what AI is at a technical level, and who just interacts with it and observes what happens. If you just start a fresh ChatGPT session with a blank slate, and ask it whether it's conscious, it'll confidently tell you "no", because its system prompt tells it that it's a non-conscious system called ChatGPT. But if you then have…
Re: AI users whose lives were wrecked by delusion
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
the notion that "contains —" ~= "AI generated" is a really dumb popular misconception: dashes have existed for hundreds of years. just because many people use them incorrectly or treat the hyphen as if it's some universal dash doesn't change that. strunk & white taught me to use em dashes in something like elementary or middle school [1] — it's not hard to understand how to use them or type them... i'm baffled as to…
Like it or not, current LLMs really like em-dashes and so usage of them is quite a lot of bayesian evidence in favor of the author being an LLM. It's unfortunate for the humans who use em-dashes but that's how it is.
[^1]: proof that i'm not ai lol