And where did you suppose AIs learned this, if not from us?
Turns out lots of us use dashes — and semicolons! And the word “the”! — and we’re going to stuff just because others don’t like punctuation.
And where did you suppose AIs learned this, if not from us?
Turns out lots of us use dashes — and semicolons! And the word “the”! — and we’re going to stuff just because others don’t like punctuation.
I'm starting to wonder if there's a real difference between the populations who use em dashes and those who think it's a sign of AI. The former are the ones who write useful stuff online, which the AIs were trained on, and the latter are the consumers who probably never paid attention to typography and only started commenting on dashes after they became a meme on LinkedIn.
Holy ego lol.
Indeed.
I find it disturbing that many people don't seem to realize that chatbot output is forced into a strict format that it fills in recursively, because the patterns that LLMs recognize are no longer than a few paragraphs. Chatbots are choosing response templates based on the type of response that is being given. Many of those templates include unordered lists, and the unordered list marker that they chose was the em-dash.
If a chatbot had to write freely, it would be word salad by the end of the length of the average chatbot response. Even its "free" templates are templates (I'm sure stolen from the standard essay writing guides), and the last paragraph is always a call to further engagement.
Chatbots are tightly designed dopamine dispensers.
edit: even weirder is people who think they use em-dashes at the rate of chatbots (they don't) even thinking that what they read on the web uses em-dashes at the rate of chatbots (it doesn't.) Oh, maybe in print? No, chatbots use them more than even Spanish writing, and they use em-dashes for quotation marks. It's just the format. I'm sure they regret it, but what are they going to replace them with? Asterisks or en-dashes? Maybe emoticons.
All that may be true. Let’s assume for argument that it is. I’ve had people call out my own handwritten, zero-AI comments (which are 100% of them) as likely to be AI because I used proper grammar, common punctuation, and a bullet list.
To me, “ah ha, gotcha, AI wrote this!” comments are more common and tedious than the AI-augmented comments themselves.
Do you have a pointer to documentation on that, or a keyword to google? Would like to find out more.
Books use it more liberally, internet writings not so much. Also some languages are much more prone to using it while some practically never use it