Now that AI has ruined the emdash for punctuation enthusiasts like us... I've been thinking of switching to the double emdash (⸺) and worst case, fellow humans, there's always the triple: ⸻
People over-update when they see an em-dash. If you compute the posterior probability, you'll realize that seeing an em-dash hardly shifts the probability that text is AI generated.
These days it almost feels like a breach of etiquette not to tell ChatGPT to avoid em dashes, otherwise it’s immediately obvious the text was generated by GPT.
I suspect that at least in part, the fad in the AI community of using all-lowercase is to make sure that their writing can't be mistaken for LLM-generated output.
Sam Altman more than anyone else popularised this style and for a while every thrid or fourth comment on any AI-related topic was all lowercase.
I 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, we'll collectively realize that trying to reliably discriminate between AI and human writing is no different than reading tea leaves. We should judge content based on its intrinsic value, not its provenance. We should call each other out for poor writing or inaccurate information — not because if we squint we can pick out some loose correlations with ChatGPT's default output style.
Consciously trying not to "sound like an LLM" while writing is like consciously trying not to think about the fact that you're currently breathing, or consciously trying to sound like a cool guy.
I miss good typography, but in truth it demands more patience writing than I am prepared to expend, so I am in effect unwilling to put in, what I want to get out. Thats the kind of asymmetry in behaviour which got us here.
I grew up online in teletype and ADM5. To some extent, my sense of how text presents is dominated by monotype/fixed-width and em-dashes just never worked in that 7 bit world.
Two hyphens is too much. one hyphen is not enough.
No offense to any em-dash lovers, but I think an overuse of em-dashes indicates that your writing is probably slop, just not AI slop, human slop. In a sense, there is a kind of slop that relies on em-dashes to glue things together - usually in a cliche way, learned from lazy journalists copy-pasting from their last article to add a bit of spice to their writing - and AI just copied it.
I'm calling it now: within a year, somehow a trend will appear where writers will perform their duties under voluntary video surveillance showing the human's face, fingers and screen contents (possibly by multiple cameras) to "prove" they did it on their own.
This video will be too voluminous or intrusive to be viewed manually, so it will be analyzed by (you guessed it) AI to determine if the work was authentic.
It will probably be developed and required by the corrupt education industry, but perhaps some writers will voluntarily use it to buy authenticity or stand out. But either way, the machine will once again find another way to take our agency and make our lives less enjoyable.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 51.9 ms ] threadI keep punctuating like it's the 18th Century, myself;—compound points are my favorites:—like the colon-dash compound, AKA the "dog's bollocks."
Sam Altman more than anyone else popularised this style and for a while every thrid or fourth comment on any AI-related topic was all lowercase.
Eventually, as models and their users both improve, we'll collectively realize that trying to reliably discriminate between AI and human writing is no different than reading tea leaves. We should judge content based on its intrinsic value, not its provenance. We should call each other out for poor writing or inaccurate information — not because if we squint we can pick out some loose correlations with ChatGPT's default output style.
Consciously trying not to "sound like an LLM" while writing is like consciously trying not to think about the fact that you're currently breathing, or consciously trying to sound like a cool guy.
I don’t use the word “delve” anymore, however.
Compose --- should produce —
For en dash it's
Compose --. produces –
Not all fonts show the difference though.
I grew up online in teletype and ADM5. To some extent, my sense of how text presents is dominated by monotype/fixed-width and em-dashes just never worked in that 7 bit world.
Two hyphens is too much. one hyphen is not enough.
An em dash that’s not a sudden interruption shouldn’t have any spacing around it.
(On the other hand, maybe it's just low-paid writers in South Africa: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/apr/16/techscape... )
This video will be too voluminous or intrusive to be viewed manually, so it will be analyzed by (you guessed it) AI to determine if the work was authentic.
It will probably be developed and required by the corrupt education industry, but perhaps some writers will voluntarily use it to buy authenticity or stand out. But either way, the machine will once again find another way to take our agency and make our lives less enjoyable.