[mrandish]

Prior to the rise of LLM-written posts and the natural reaction of hair-trigger suspicion, I used to em and en dash fairly often in posts on HN. No reason really other than being a bit of a typography geek who happens to have always used dashes in casual writing instead of semicolons. So when I was setting up a modifier-key keyboard layer with AHK many years ago I put the em dash on modifier+dash just because I could - which made it easy.

Now someone may search old posts without a time cutoff and assume I'm an LLM. That combined with the fact I sometimes write longer posts and naturally default to pretty good punctuation, spelling and grammar, is basically a perfect storm of traits. I've already had posts accused twice in the past year of being an LLM.

Kind of sad some random quirk of LLM training caused a fun little typography thing I did just for myself (assuming no one else would even notice) to become something negative.

[marssaxman]

My teenager recently asked me why I write like a chatbot, apparently unaware that some human beings prefer to write in complete sentences with attention to details like spelling, punctuation, grammar, and capitalization, and that LLMs were trained on this sort of writing.

This makes me think of the fad where people on youtube will hold a microphone up in frame, because it somehow connotes authenticity. I'm sure some people are already embracing a bit of sloppiness in their writing as a signal of humanity; I'm equally sure that future chatbots will learn to do the same.

[ASalazarMX]

2040 at Wal-Mart:

- Customer: Excuse me, I'm looking for the Aunt Jemima maple syrup. Can you point me in the right direction?

- Employee: y u ask like chatbot

[pluc]

Idiocracy called this "talking like a fag".

[mcbishop]

The creator of OpenClaw, for example, has come to appreciate grammatical / spelling errors in human writing (as he said in a recent Lex Fridman interview).

[piskov]

If you are using a dynamic microphone, most of the time it will be in frame because best distance is around 7cm from your mouth.

[Animats]

> people on youtube will hold a microphone up in frame,

Now you need a really big microphone, something that looks like it was built in 1952.

[SunshineTheCat]

I recently posted a youtube short of some of my drawings I did on my iPad using Procreate and moving them into Illustrator.

Got several comments saying they were "AI slop."

Even had a screen cap of my drawing process.

Kinda funny to think my drawings, which have likely "trained" AI image generators, are now getting accused of being AI.

[globular-toast]

I've been thinking about the "human signal" ever since the first GPT. Interestingly, a few years ago I would get people questioning whether my posts were written by GPT, but that's stopped now. I'm not sure if it's because they no longer think that or because it's not interesting any more.

I wonder if there's a way we can communicate that LLMs fundamentally can't keep up with. If LLMs have hit on being exactly the way our brains work then I guess not. But maybe we still have something special. I haven't tried how well LLMs understand language written like in Iain M. Banks's Feersum Endjinn.

[SpaceManNabs]

I got similar accusations recently on reddit lol. Just because i am used to formatting markdown i like to format some of my reddit comments. i have no idea how to avoid the accusations besides typing less formally except by typing like thisss.

[andreareina]

I'm given to understand that you've got to have your mic pretty close up to keep noise down. You don't have to eat it, but it wants to be close enough that it's going to be in frame.

Ed: I'm sure there's cargo culting going on but the visibility of the mic isn't only performative.

[kcexn]

I can imagine a future where writing that is considered sloppy today is considered good because of LLMs.

[pvtmert]

I started making deliberate grammar and spelling mistakes in professional context. Not like I have a perfect writing anyway, but at least I could prove that it was self-written, not an auto-generated slop. (Could be self-written slop though :)

This applies not only work-stuff itself also to the job-applications/cv/resume and cover-letters.

[mikkupikku]

I've seen some youtube people just holding random objects as though they were microphones, I guess deliberately meming on the conspicuous microphone thing. Or maybe it helps with their confidence, I could see that.

[jeremy151]

You're absolutely right! I kid. I'm also a former avid user of the em-dash, but have mostly stopped using it. I've even started replacing em-dash usage with commas, which often results in a slightly awkward, perhaps incorrect, but quaintly artisanal sentence with a LaCroix-like spritz of authenticity.

My double-space-after-a-period though, I will keep that until the end. Even if it often doesn't even render in HTML output, I feel a nostalgic connection to my 1993 high school typing teacher's insistence that a sentence must be allowed to breathe.

[bhk]

And by the way, what the Hell is up with all these people claiming that two spaces is an obsolete typewriter-era pre-proportional-font thing? Narrow proportional spaces make two spaces after a period MORE important for visually separating sentences. Is it old fashioned to think logically?

[CuriouslyC]

Sadly, the comma is not a good em-dash replacement. IME, periods and semicolons do the job best. I still use em-dashes in place of parentheses though because they're so much more readable.

[skue]

You know the only reason we used double spaces between sentences in the typewriter days was because everything was monospaced, right? Modern variable width fonts provide additional space automatically.

[mike_hearn]

Have the same problem but with bullet points, which I learned to type years ago and have used on HN for a long time:

• Like

• This

(option-8 on a Mac US keyboard layout). Now it looks like something only an LLM would do.

[mghackerlady]

Hell I've been accused simply for using markdown. Granted, excessive formatting in markdown (especially when I'm telling a bad faith wikipedia contributor to cut it out since wikipedia doesn't even use markdown) is one of the biggest suspects for me but theres a difference between italicising something for emphasis and and *bolding* every statement *to an excessive degree*

[ale42]

For those who are interested, that one is Alt-7 (numeric keypad) on Windows. This works because in the "OEM" codepage (e.g. 437), char 7 corresponds to a symbol that is mapped into Unicode to • (← I just typed this using Alt-7, and the arrow using Alt-27). In a similar way I type the infamous ones—the ones that give you away as an LLM even if you aren't one. It's Alt-0151, this time with no OEM codepage conversion because of the zero in front (anyway that codepage had no em-dashes, the closest one would be Alt-196, which is ─, i.e. a line drawing character).

[dylan604]

I love using ° with is the opt-shift-8 when posting temps to indicate I'm on a real keyboard and not some device. Plus, it's just faster than typing degrees

[altairprime]

How dire the literacy crisis, that chatbots are their only exposure to composition.

[heresie-dabord]

The future of education is LLMs representing educational standards to a population of innumerates and illiterates.

[WesolyKubeczek]

> Now someone may search old posts without a time cutoff and assume I'm an LLM.

I use em dashes, and I don't care whether or not someone assumes I'm an LLM. Typography exists for a reason.

[MerrimanInd]

> default to pretty good punctuation, spelling and grammar

If leaving out the Oxford comma here was an intentional joke I both commend and curse you!

[colechristensen]

My rage–induced habit of ignoring typos caused by the iPhone autocorrect and general abuse of English is suddenly authentic and not lazy and slightly obnoxious (ok maybe it's still those things too)

>I put the em dash on modifier+dash

This is the default on Macs

[chirayuk]

It's Option Shift "-" for the em-dash. Option "-" is the en-dash.

[cwnyth]

Ex-academic here. I too use/tended to use em-dashes quite a bit. It's easy to compose in Linux (Gnome) with a real keyboard: Ctrl Shift U 2014 is ingrained in my head from using them all the time in my academic work.

[BenjiWiebe]

Are you familiar with the 'Compose' key/xcompose?

[calf]

As an em-dash abuser I have decided that it is a crutch to not think through what I am saying--I can lazily connect a stream of thoughts rather than think clearly and explicitly form sentence transitions and so on

[gkoberger]

I do agree... I sometimes use worse grammar (like that ellipses) and leave in typos just so my comments feel more "real" now.

[goodmythical]

fun fact, grok and kimi are both pretty good at emulating "chat" responses with any number of prompts.

"respond like a twitter user", "pretend like we're texting", etc

[xeckr]

Show HN: A RL suite that teaches LLMs to introduce typos at just the right frequency for the output to appear more human.

[Imustaskforhelp]

soon were gonna be the ones adding random typos and grammer errors just to blend in. i skip apostrophes and mispell words on purpose already. its strange how fast sloppy writing starts feeling natural

(This above line itself was written by AI itself: https://www.kimi.com/share/19c96516-4032-8b73-8000-0000f45eb...)

I don't know if worse grammar could make a difference aside from removing false negatives (ie. nowadays people with good grammar are questioned if they are LLM's or not) but this itself doesn't mean that worse grammar itself means its written by a human. (This paragraph is written by me, a human, Hi :D)

[_verandaguy]

Same here, but it'll be a cold day in hell before you see me using the dreaded double-period-bang..!

[Yizahi]

Were you using them as a replacement for a comma--without spaces on both sides of the em-dash--like how I did just now? If no, you are safe from being mistaken for an LLM program. Honestly, while it is a legitimate punctuation rule, I've never seen a human on the internet to write like that. But LLMs do it constantly, whenever they generate long enough sentences.

[98codes]

I'm a human who writes like that, because mobile and desktop OSs have made it easy—so easy—to include things like em-dashes and other formerly uncommon punctuation. I also come from an age where people were taught things like proper grammar and punctuation, so go figure.

[dylan604]

I've used the -- with no spaces in posts to HN multiple times.

[hojinkoh]

I still have em-dash pinned at the top of my clipboard manager. Though nowadays I'm training myself to use some more definitely incorrect punctuations ((like this)) in informal scenarios;; hopefully LLMs won't catch up to such strange usage anytime soon.

Broken sentences. Also useful. Like in some literature works.

[abustamam]

I use double hyphens instead of em-dashes when I'm on my computer. I think some programs will combine them into an em-dash but most of the time they're just double dashes.

My phone lets me long-press the hyphen key to get an em-dash so sometimes I'll use it.

Probably the biggest tell that I'm not AI is that I'm probably not using it in the appropriate circumstances!

[mainframed]

I also used em-dash before LLMs, though I would not call myself a typography geek. But yesterday I wrote a birthday message to someone and replaced my em-dashes with minus signs, because I did not want them to think that my message is LLM generated..

[sodacanner]

It really is unfortunate that such a fun piece of punctuation has been effectively gutted. This isn't even really limited to just the em-dash, but I don't know if there's another example of a corporation (or set of them) having such a massive impact on grammar and writing as OpenAI and their ilk have.

Entire sentence structures have been effectively blacklisted from use. It's repulsive.

[hsbauauvhabzb]

Surely AI engine developers will notice patterns in which humans identify them, and change their behavior to avoid detection.

You’d think ethically leaving it in would be better. But we’re talking about big tech companies here.

[smallmancontrov]

It's not just repulsive — it's the complete destruction of tool through intense overuse!

Speaking of overusing something until it becomes cringe, has anyone shown their kids Firefly? Does it still hold up after the Joss Whedon signature bathos (and other tics) became a tentpole of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and created an abundance of cultural antibodies?

[Imustaskforhelp]

> It really is unfortunate that such a fun piece of punctuation has been effectively gutted. This isn't even really limited to just the em-dash, but I don't know if there's another example of a corporation (or set of them) having such a massive impact on grammar and writing as OpenAI and their ilk have.

Well, to be fair Gen-z slangs also have a massive impact. My generation sometimes point blank said to me that they didn't have the attention span to read my sentence :/

Definitely picked up a few slangs along the way now. I had to somehow toggle a switch between how I write on HN/how I write with my friends the first few times and I write pretty informally in HN, but its that you got to be saying lowk bussin rizz 67 to make sense.

My friends who use insta literally had Abbreivations which were of 9 letter words in my own language that the insta community of my nation's gen-z sort of made.

Although I would agree that we haven't seen a whole unicode being thrown this way in ALL generations (I feel like universally everyone treats em-dashes as something written by AI or definitely get an AI alert)

But I think that 67 is something that atp maybe even most adults might have gotten exposed to which has probably changed the meaning of number.

[NetMageSCW]

What’s repulsive is the people who comment incorrectly based on that punctuation or grammar use and the ones who then kowtow to public opinion as if it matters.

There is no such thing as blacklisted by other commenters.

[rnxrx]

I'm also increasingly aware that my own writing style and punctuation seem to line up with what might be associated with an AI, but some of the tells (em-dashes, spaces after periods, etc) seem like artifacts of when in history we learned to write.

I wonder how much crossover there would be between a trained text analysis model looking for Gen-X authors and another looking for LLM's.

[ibejoeb]

I worked on something like this in 2000-1. We were attempting to identify the native language and origin region of authors based on aberrant modes in second languages (as a simple case, a french person writing english might say "we are tuesday.") It was accurate and fast with the sota back then; I think you could one-shot a general purpose LLM today.

[mghackerlady]

People don't put spaces after periods? Do people really write.like.this?

[AlecSchueler]

Fwiw your comment has lots of human tells and doesn't seem AI generated at all.

[mrandish]

Sadly, I think the same is true for my two posts accused of being LLM generated. It's become a bit of a reflexive witch-hunt when just being more than five sentences and basically decent grammar / vocabulary is enough to garner some drive-by accusations. Hopefully, it's a short-term over reaction that will subside.

[nextaccountic]

I used to use a minus dash "-" often on my comments. Not em dash, but, still, it might be confused for AI, so I stopped doing that.l

[azalemeth]

I have consistently used em-dashes, either in the form of alt+- on MacOS, or in the form of `--` in LaTeX (or `---`), for the last 30 odd years.

Now I find myself deliberately making things worse to avoid being accused of not being human! Bah!

[xdennis]

I used to do that too… even using the ellipses character instead of three dots. But on the other hand I'm not a native English speaker and have poor spelling (i.e. words pass spell check, but are incorrect).

That's one of the signals I use to detect if YouTube videos are AI slop. If it's narrated by a non-native speaker, it's much more likely to be high quality. If it's narrated by a British voice with a deep timber, it's 100% AI.

[zeristor]

When every breath is a Turing test, AmIBotOrNot?

I’m waiting for a Philip K. Dick bot to declare me non-human.

Am I the only one who in a Captcha test sometimes wants a different option for the “I am Human” check box? Ironically really since to prove we’re human we have to check the boxes with a crossing in them, no account to be made of people who call them zebra crossings.

[hinkley]

I use “-“ because I thought the amount of parentheticals I was using was a bit unhinged. In these times of TLDR, I sometimes move the aside to the bottom as an afterthought instead of leaving it inline.

I dunno this en versus em dash stuff, I just use the minus sign on my keyboard.

[AlyssaRowan]

I do a similar thing — also with AHK! — and I don’t intend to stop. I think probably the AI/LLM bubble will pop before I consider changing my habits there.

Tip: Patterns like “It’s not just X, it’s Y” are a more telltale sign of LLM slop. I assume they probably trained on too much marketing blurb at some point and now it’s stuck.

[Razengan]

I also used — and "proper" quotes which macOS/iOS puts in for you anyway

I also like …

This is like ruining swastikas and loading rainbows

[mghackerlady]

The ellipsis problem is solved by using ... instead of the dedicated unicode character

[mattmanser]

ChatGPT evolves, everything grows. In AI speech, tells abound. Comma, emphasis. A new way, a better way.

[danparsonson]

> Comma, emphasis.

> A new way, a better way.

The autumn winds blow.

[anotherevan]

> assume I'm an LLM

I've noticed a habit of late of people accusing a comment of being LLM generated if they disagree with it. It was getting quite tiresome a few weeks ago but seems to have died down.

I suppose it is possible that they are actually LLMs making the accusations? :-)

(I'm one of those weirdos that try to use proper grammar and complete sentences in text messages and instant messages.)

[dmos62]

Exactly what an LLM would say, haha.

[kandros]

Nice try