Why em dashes specifically? Why is THAT what we blame on AI?
Nope. I’m autistic so it’s gonna’ happen regardless.
No, fuck dumbasses who think a dash makes you a computer.
Very. I dont just use em dashes but also tend to write in a way that gets mistaken for AI a bit too much for my liking. In the worst of cases, I have watched AI detection softwares flag my assignments as “high likelihood of being AI generated” despite me not even having used AI for them. Before Chatgpt was mainstream, professors thought that my writing sounded well versed, elonquent and professional, now I just get slapped with an accusation of using AI when I actually didnt.
Mostly afraid of people realizing I’m an academic. Em-dashes are a dead giveaway.
Apologies, this is a rant. Please ignore if you are an em dash fan and know that I am not ranting at you, but at its creator.
As someone who has had to deal with comparing text output via automated tests, this thread hurts. I hate Em Dashes and whoever invented them with a burning passion. They make text comparison a nightmare.
“Let’s invent a character that looks exactly like a slightly longer hyphen, but isn’t!” Brilliant. Well done.
Why not just make the hyphen longer instead so people can just type it, like they do with every other character? Nope, instead, let’s invent a different character that can only be typed if you know the Unicode ID.
Even worse is the fact that there are also En Dashes. Because we definitely needed both and couldn’t just type multiple consecutive hyphens to make the line longer…
The worst part is that if you are writing physically, and you’re not a robot, there is no way to distinguish between these at all; they are all just hyphens.
I just use HTML entities to type en and em dashes. — -> — – -> –
Oh nice Lemmy supports these entities.
On Typst its
--
The character was created specifically because when we write we use different length dashes to mean different things—subtraction through to a pause for thinking.
The automated test will have no difficulty telling them apart. Are you saying it’s hard looking at the results of this tests? You might need to use a font that makes that easy (I agree many monospaced fonts don’t, but that’s not the character’s fault. Or include a step that replaces en with 2 hyphens and em with 3.
AI really loves to steal from fanfiction on sites likeAo3 and blog/forum posts— All places where em-dashes are common. AI uses them because people use them. I’m not going to change how I write because someone else built a plagiarism machine.
I did get accused of using ChatGPT to write something once, based on my use of em-dashes. Kinda just had to laugh though because it was something I’d published in 2014.
no way why should i change they’re the one that sucks
Found Michael Bolton.
No, I’m not afraid. I’ve been using me-dashes for decades now, and I won’t stop just because some idiots flood the streets with worthless AI junk that happens to copy long-established practices in text formatting.
I don’t worry about that. There are other markers of AI that are much more reliable:
- Extreme verbosity.
- Low S/N - i.e. lots of words to say not much at all.
- Perfect grammar.
- If you drill down into the subject, often completely incorrect - but you don’t know without having to read a whole bunch of tedious text.
And here’s how you recognize AI:
-
High-schoolers turning a paper on a subject they know nothing about often fluff up their paper - at least when students still wrote their papers themselves - and hit 1. and 2., but rarely 3.
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Good writers always hit 3. They can be terse or verbose, and they may or may not hit 1., but never 2. or 4.
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Internet writers don’t write like journalists. Only journalists writing for a journal that happens to also publish on the internet write like journalists. Internet writers don’t quite hit 3, knowledgeable ones don’t hit 2., and almost none of them ever hit 1. Or said another way, when you read something about Linux networking that looks like an Atlantic op-ed, it’s AI.
Only AI hits 1., 2. and 3. AI almost always writes in a tone and form that doesn’t befit the venue.
As for 4., if you want an example of this, try to search “NFC unlock” on DDG or Bing (same AI-laden Microsoft trash search engine): you will find scores of perfectly-written articles that explain in painful details how you should buy NFC tags (they don’t say which), program them (they don’t say how), then present the tags to your device (they don’t say what devices) to program them to unlock upon presenting the tags.
If you know anything about NFC, you know this is all shades of wrong. But amazingly, each article on the subject is many pages long, perfectly written, and there are countless such articles.
Wow you explained AIs tone and writing very well.
I find it interesting that AI writes very high level, which is a trait that seems to be valued by upper management (VP, CEO level).
I find it interesting that AI writes very high level, which is a trait that seems to be valued by upper management (VP, CEO level).
I think at some point someone will figure out that AI would sound more natural if it didn’t write so perfectly, and they’ll try to make AI sound hip and casual, and I’m almost certain AI will still fail to be convincingly casual.
I haven’t really tried but I think if you were trying to use LLM generated text deceptively the model could probably do exactly as you describe already so long as you prompt it to do so clearly enough.
To be honest I thought AI was already used to flood popular message boards with user content trying to sound natural to show user engagement.
Yeah for sure, but there’s always something off that screams fake.
That’s why I prefer lemmy! Real users.
First it was trolls, then it was trolls using AI. I understand why many users are abandoning social networks.
Trolls arguing AI bots would be a whole new level lol
I think, part of the “problem” is that most of their training data is formal language. They’ll have much less data from private chats and such.
Meta has their own AI Llama. I’d imagine meta would have private chat data.
You can write in the prompt to the AI to write in hip and casual tone, but you will get something that will give you “How Do You Do, Fellow Kids?” meme vibes.
I thoroughly enjoyed what you did with the formatting there.
Yes! 😩😐
What is going on with those faces?! lol
People have told me for most of my life to talk and write “more normal” so that they wouldn’t have to use a dictionary or think for more than a second about what they’re reading — this is just the latest instance of them looking for a shortcut to disregard anything they don’t immediately understand.
Fuck ‘em.
Because they fucking stole it from me! I’ll be damned if I let a machine–intelligent or not–force me into changing the way I, an individual, choose to express myself in my own language!
I’ve started using them to mess with people.
No, but it pisses me off as an indie author. I adore em-dashes. Not my fault stupid people who don’t read have never seen them before outside of their crappy AI.
