Just got a few recommendations by my colleagues on LinkedIn that were clearly written by an LLM, the long emdash was even present. But then again, the message was tuned to specific things I did. Also they were from Eastern Europe, so I imagine they just fixed their input.
If you call yourself a writer, having tell tale LLM signs is bad. But for people who's work doesn't involve having a personal voice in written language, it might help them getting them to express things in a better way than before.
I've been using em dashes since long before LLMs existed, and I won't stop. Some people might think it's a sign of an LLM, but I know it's just a sign of their own short-sightedness.
It's really frustrating to have to adjust my writing style to seem more human despite being entirely human. Many of us have been using em dashes for a long time, who else do people think the LLMs learnt it from?
Exactly. I think the whole emdash thing is a nonsense meme propagated by Xfluencers or LinkFluencers.
Em dashes are fine in throwaway casual writing like internet comments or tweets or whatever. However, I think that, in any writing that is significant enough that LLM usage is scrutinized, they often just come across as a crutch to avoid more planned out sentence flow. I think it's actually a good thing that people are feeling like they should cut down on them.
Wrong. They show up in some of the best and most widely and intensely read prose that exists, with good reason. Of course, like any tool, they can be misused by people who don't know better.
You wanna cite any sources for that?
I don't know of any prose that relies on crutch dashes
Pretty much any good work of literature? Or any technical document? Framing them as "crutch dashes" doesn't instantly make them so.
To make sure I wasn't posting out of my ass i opened Gravity's Rainbow to 4 or 5 random pages. All confirmed what I said above.
Maybe you should read more widely. It's good for the brain!
>Gravity's Rainbow
>widely and intensely read prose
Dunno about that.
Pynchon's prose is notably colloquial, complete with lots of ellipses. Congrats on your Big Boy Book™ though.
This issue, as I understand it, is about the actual choice to use an emdash character (—) rather than a hyphen (-), and about the effort involved in doing so. It's not about sentence structure.
I don't really understand how AI developed a bias towards doing it correctly rather than doing it the lazy way. But hearing so much about emdashes qua LLM detection mechanism eventually just got me to decide that typing an ordinary hyphen really is just lazy. And then I ended up configuring my system to make it reasonably easy to type them.
Yeah, we smart people were using en and em dashes appropriately long before LLMs mimics appeared.
Latex power users unite against the markdown monkey keyboard mashers!
So... sorry (not sorry!) that LLMs try to be like us and not the heathens.
Craziest thing I saw at work was someone using AI generated text in a farewell card. Like it's so obvious, it's so much more offensive to send someone an AI generated message than to just not send anything at all.
What made it obvious?
Non native English speaker suddenly using very elaborate language, a particularly long message without any specific details, just fluffy phrases. And em dashes.
> it might help them getting them to express things in a better way than before.
You know what people did before the AI fad? They read other people's books. They found and talked to interesting people. They found themselves in, or put themselves in, interesting situations. They spent a lot of time cogitating and ruminating before they decided they ought to write their ideas down. They put in a lot of effort.
Now the AI salemen come, and insist you don't need a wealth of ezperience and talent, you just need their thingy, price £29.99 from all good websites. Now you can be like a Replicant, with your factory-implanted memories instead of true experience.
Did people really use to do all that work when someone asked them to write a recommendation on LinkedIn?
No, but people who called themselves a writer did, or should.
You are right.
> clearly written by an LLM, the long emdash was even present.
Can we please stop propagating this accusation? Alright, sure, maybe LLMs overuse the em-dash, but it is a valid topographical mark which was in use way before LLMs and is even auto-inserted by default by popular software on popular operating systems—it is never sufficient on its own to identify LLM use (and yes, I just used it—multiple times—on purpose on 100% human-written text).
Sincerily,
Someone who enjoys and would like to be able to continue to use correct punctuation, but doesn’t judge those who don’t.
So do you always put in the ALT+<code> incantation to get an emdash or copy&paste?
I feel the emdash is a tell because you have to go out of your way to use it on a computer keyboard. Something anyone other than the most dedicated punctuation geeks won't do for a random message on the internet.
Things are different for typeset books.
> So do you always put in the ALT+<code> incantation to get an emdash or copy&paste?
There’s no incantation. On macOS it’s either ⌥- (option+hyphen) or ⇧⌥- (shift+option+hyphen) depending on keyboard layout. It’s no more effort than using ⇧ for an uppercase letter. On iOS I long-press the hyphen key. I do the same for the correct apostrophe (’). These are so ingrained in my muscle memory I can’t even tell you the exact keys I press without looking at the keyboard. For quotes I have an Alfred snippet which replaces "" with “” and places the cursor between them.
But here’s the thing: you don’t even have to do that because Apple operating systems do it for you by default. Type -- and it converts to —; type ' in the middle of a word and it replaces it with ’; quotes it also adds the correct start and end ones depending on where you type them.
The reason I type these myself instead of using the native system methods is that those work a bit too well. Sometimes I need to type code in non-code apps (such as in a textarea in a browser) and don’t want the replacements to happen.
> I feel the emdash is a tell because you have to go out of your way to use it on a computer keyboard.
You do not. Again, on Apple operating systems these are trivial and on by default.
> Something anyone other than the most dedicated punctuation geeks won't do for a random message on the internet.
Even if that were true—which, as per above, it’s not, you don't have to be that dedicated to type two hyphens in a row—it makes no sense to conflate those who care enough about their writing to use correct punctuation and those who don’t even care enough to type the words themselves. They stand at opposite ends of the spectrum.
Again, using em-dashes as one signal is fine; using it as the principal or sole signal is not.
On Linux, I configured my Caps Lock key to function as a compose key, and then use my ~/.XCompose file to make it easier.
I also set things up such that hitting Caps Lock twice in a row sends an Escape character, which makes using Vim a tiny bit nicer.
On Windows, I use autohotkey and have a bunch of keyboard shortcuts for producing characters that I use fairly often but are difficult to type.
My keyboard has no keypad so I’m not sure there’s another way.
You type -- and it gets auto converted.
no I use -- and ---. not all of us use Microsoft word for serious writing.
Fact is that I maybe saw it in 10% of blogs and news articles before Chatgpt. And now it pops up in emails, slack messages, HN/reddit comments and probably more than half of blog posts?
Yes it's not a guarantee but it is at least a very good signal that something was at least partially LLM written. It is also a very practical signal, there are a few other signs but none of them are this obvious.
> Fact is that I maybe saw it in 10% of blogs and news articles before Chatgpt.
I believe you. But also be aware of the Frequency Illusion. The fact that someone mentions that as an LLM signal also makes you see it more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion
> Yes it's not a guarantee but it is at least a very good signal that something was at least partially LLM written.
Which is perfectly congruent with what I said with emphasis:
> it is never sufficient on its own to identify LLM use
I have no quarrel with using it as one signal. My beef is when it’s used as the principal or sole signal.
Dubious. The only signal this gives that in aggregate people use AI. On individual basis, presence of em dashes means nothing.
> And now it pops up in emails, slack messages, HN/reddit comments and probably more than half of blog posts?
Yeah, maybe that's the one thing people who didn't know how to do it before have learnt from "AI" output.
you'll have to get my en/em dashes out of my cold dead fingers.
> the long emdash [...] tell tale LLM signs
I so wish people would stop spouting this bogus "sign" — but I know I'm going to be disappointed.
... you know all serious writers use mdash right? This is not so magic LLM watermark