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[–] [S] 142 points 3 months ago (32 children)
  • [–] 65 points 3 months ago (13 children)

    It's that em-dash at the end that really solidified it for me. Was kinda on the fence most of the way through.

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  • [–] 40 points 3 months ago (8 children)

    My wife is a professional writer and uses em dash a lot, usually as --, including in her casual messages, as it's common for her to use.

    It's the formatting style of the whole thing that sounds AI to me. "Honestly" phrases really jumps out at me now, as well as the "But..." fragments. Not that they're bad, hell, I type out things that way too. But for it to be all together, it sounds AI after you've seen it a lot.

    The em dash is fine here, emphasizing the final point. Although I would have probably used a comma myself for a post and not a formal manuscript.

    Funny thing is, you can get AI to reduce a lot of these tells with a decent system prompt and staging of the writing process. So I'm surprised we're still seeing it a lot and it hasn't been weaned out of the latest versions.

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  • [–] 16 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 child)

    It's really hard to get rid of things caused by systematic bias in the training data.

    After inhaling the entire internet, LLMs started being trained on publically available books.
    And due to copyright, those were older ones from a time when em-dashes were used more.
    The training results were tested by humans, which needed to be cheap, but also English language natives.
    So they used workers in English-speaking African countries. Where the English taught in school is also more traditional with a focus on older literature, so the answers coming from the old literature were rated higher by the testers.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    The use of "--" is interesting, I use dashes to convey pacing constantly because I type as I speak, and so punctuation to me is largely about trying to write the delivery I want the reader to percieve, and I always just use "-" knowing it's incorrect, but I don't exactly wanna make myself seem even more like ai by switching lol

    I may try using "--", thanks for sharing that!

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    I actually used to do the same thing with the -, and by em dash becoming a thing I dived into the usage and history of it all, including ; and en dash. And now I'm using - less. But I don't use em dash more, just tend to throw a comma in.

    Another weird one I learned. em dash spacing. The spacing AI tends to use is not preferred by publishers now, but is more AP style, perhaps picking it up from when it was more popular to have space between the letters. Europe tends to prefer spacing but with a en dash (and I kind of like how that looks too, but it doesn't fly if you publish in the US).

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    Wait, so what spacing is generally preferred for the em dash? Thats interesting, I never formally learned how to use one so I'm curious (I've not been to college, I have no idea if its part of typical higher education curriculum if you take any english courses)

    I abuse the fuck out of commas so I reach for dashes or ; when I want a longer pause that isn't a logical end point for a thought. But a semicolon feels somehow a bit more formal to me, so I use it less for general online chatting

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago

    My other half writes a lot of formal documentation as part of her work. She uses bullet lists and em-dashes a lot, and her work comes up as >90% AI. Even the stuff she wrote a decade ago. A while back, she took one of her documents and gave it to ChatGPT and said, "make this pass an AI test" and it went down to about 20% but it was no longer the house style.

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  • [–] 44 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Bruh, I'm calling shenanigans on this tool. Yes, post is probably ai, but there is no tool that can accurately tell ai text from human text. "The most accurate ai detector" is like me calling a stick "the most accurate god detector". It's a meaningless distinction when the detection isn't possible to do accurately.

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  • [–] -4 points 3 months ago (13 children)

    that batman image,, uhh,,, recite it from memory,,, batman says "this is the tool of the enemy, we shall not use it" or something,,, idk,,,
    (...why?? does lemmy collapse the commas into one??? eww
    and uses the unicode ellipsis??? ugh
    tip: be generous with backslashes! if it is not what you typed, then do not sit there and take it! defend yourself with the slashes!! ! !!)

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  • [–] 8 points 3 months ago (9 children)

    Lemmy uses markdown, you can choose to learn it instead of getting frustrated about it lol. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

    Also, why are you putting question marks in the middle of the sentence? Reads horrible.

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  • [+] -17 points 3 months ago* (8 children)

    xml is better than markdown, you will not change my mind, but i would like to see you try
    when they were writing the code to convert markdown to xml, because no, sane or insane, web browser supports markdown, did, at no point, did they think "gosh, there's got to be a better way"???

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  • [–] 11 points 3 months ago* (4 children)

    xml is better than markdown, you will not change my mind

    Markdown is for humans who are writing their prose on the fly and don't want to be bothered with the cognitive load associated with the extra verbiage and rulesets of XML.

    XML is for computers which are great with verbiage and rulesets.

    It's perfectly fine to have a converter between the two to bridge the gap.

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  • [+] -10 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    forcing a markup language for humans is so therianphobic!!!
    and, it is so easy to write xml. markdown is way harder. escaping markdown, you have to remember to put a backslash before every character that markdown deems special, with xml, you just use <, >, and &.
    it is both silly and saddening how many harmful stereotypes you've used in such a short span
    also, xml is an interchange format, markdown is not!!! using markdown in federated software means that it's going to break!!! you could have the editor use markdown and the federation use xml...

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  • [+] -6 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    can you say fuck on the internet??

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