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New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes

marginalia.nu

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Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes

#91
post #48

One 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…

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Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes

#92
post #48

One 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…

I've certainly noticed the summary posts.

I'll actually post a comment or question and I'll get a reply with a bit of a paragraph of what feels like a very "off" (not 'wrong' but strangely vague) summary of the topic ... and then maybe an observation or pointed agenda to push, but almost strangely disconnected from what I said.

One of the challenges is that yeah regular users don't get each other's meaning / don't read well as it is / language barriers. Yet the volume of posts I see where the other user REALLY isn't responding to the other person seems awfully high these days.

Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes

#93
post #33

If I see an em-dash in a comment I stop reading and I've seriously considered setting up a filter across multiple sites to remove any comments containing one. I know there are legitimate usecases for the em-dash, but a few paragraphs (at most) of text in an HN/Reddit comment? Into the trash it goes.

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Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes

#94
post #72
post #50

I'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 adopting conventions (typographical or otherwise) is what they do, right? The idea that anyone should then have to change their behaviour is ridiculous, as is the whole conversation, really.

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 conscious effort. An effort that now makes what they write look like lower quality

Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes

#95

700 is actually a pretty good sample size unless you are looking at some tiny crosstab, or there’s some skew (which you won’t naively scale your way out of anyway). It is also interesting to note that the comparison is between recent comments and recent comments by new users. So, I guess this would take care of the objection that em-dashes (a perfectly fine piece of punctuation) have just been popularized by bots, an…

I think what a larger sample size would do would be to help capture changes over time. Humans tend to be more active certain times of days, whereas bots don't tend to do that.

Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All will be fixed with real id attestation /s

Not exactly, bot farms can still be made with poor people IDs through black market. I don't know what the solution is going to be, but at some point we might forced to accept the reality that on the internet humans and AI won't be distinguishable anymore and adjust our services independently on the client being a person or a machine.

ID verification with video capture for every post on an attested device.

lets bring back Chrome's WEI while we're at it

/s

Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes

#97
post #36

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — Don’t mind me, just skewing the results. — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — results. — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —…

The use of em dashes is a human right. I ask that people not discriminate against em-dash users—we should be a protected class—and I refuse to abandon them. Perhaps I’ll have one engraved on my tombstone. He died doing what he loved—dashing.

Funny thing is I started using them in the last 5 or 6 years myself in place of commas where I wanted to interject some extra info. Of course I'm lazy and don't bother typing the actual em dash, I just use a regular dash. Now I feel gross using them because I don't want people thinking I turned my brain off.

Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes

#98
post #60

Shoutout to my English Major comrades who have been using em-dashes forever, and have had to stop so we don't sound like AI. If AI starts use the New Yorker style diaeresis (umlaut-looking thing when there are two vowels in words like coöperate) I swear I'm gonna lose it.

Agreed. Join me in double-dash em proximates. Shows you manually typed it out with total disregard token count and technical correctness.

Yes. To be fair, I was always a barbarian who just typed a hyphen in-place of an emdash and figured that was good enough. The only REAL em-dashes in my pre-AI writing are the result of autocorrect.

Re: New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes

#99
post #50

I'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.

Em-dashes are a bit too conversational for formal prose, so they have always been looked down on aside from usage by AI.
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