alt Hacker NewsNew accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes
Comments
Makes me wonder the ratio between LLM commenters versus those aligning with an LLMs syntax.
Not sure which is scarier
As a typography nerd, I’m upset that my pedantism may get me labelled as a bot. (Yes, I just used a typographic apostrophe instead of a straight single quote.)
Poor poor those typography-savvy people who did set a special keyboard in order to type "proper" dashes. I know you are there, I know your pain.
https://news.ycombinator.com/classic is every day more compelling.
I won't support this rampant emdashophobia. The internet deserves better typography.
So much so that I've started a Wikipedia project to replace the dashes and other abysmal characters with proper typography.
All of my devices replace hyphens with emdashes, ascii typography with glorious unicode, etc.
I would like to formally petition that the tech world at large replace "em-dash" with "clank" in all correspondence
I think they will remake the Japanese horror film Matango but instead of fungi, it will be those that use EM dashes to survive.
damnit, I just happen to like the look of the thing. now everyone thinks I'm AI for pausing in my thoughts as I write—as if I were human...
I call it stylometric---obfuscation!
I wonder if some people here considered me ai at some point
Why? What's the incentive/value to commenting here with AI?
Not everyone speaks English natively—most have relied on Google Translate in the past, and now they turn to AI tools. There's nothing wrong with that, provided they're using these tools to express their own thoughts rather than for spam or botting.
^ And that's what i just did
TBH, I learned about how to use em dashes from the AI controversy and now I find them really useful.
I just hope my writing carries enough voice and perspective that people respond, even if there's an em dash or two.
As an AI language model, I am not able to perform dashes.
It has been obvious since ChatGPT that the internet, including HN, will be flooded with AI generated commentary, drowning out real peoples' voices (soon undetectable). How this is surprising to anyone is a mystery.
This is like how I noticed the increase in thoughtbros on LinkedIn posting longform writing since the advent of LLMs..
10x more likely to use EM-dashes -- built in Rust?
Good thing I prefer en-dashes :)
The fear is that AI-generated comments will collectively promote an agenda, often a political or exploitative agenda, on a scale that humans can't match or hope to counter.
What could help is a careful clique hunting algorithm to accurately identify and delete the entire clique.
AI has taken this from me—I will never forgive.
But seriously, I loved the em-dash and now every time I use it (which is too often) I have to wonder if my words will immediately be written off.
I have "—" bound to AltGR/right option + "-" for a decade now and I don't intend to stop using it.
https://practicaltypography.com/hyphens-and-dashes.html
I will not allow my good practices to get co-opted as AI "smoke tests".
Off-topic, tangentially:
Can we generate a huge amount of code, just compilable code, which is essentially just a trash. We seed the github, bitbucket, etc. and pollute the training grounds.
I feel a sort of disappointment in how easily languages got swindled. There is seemingly no winning angle this time. This is the most doomed I've ever felt.
This is pretty damning. It would be interesting to see if new accounts collect karma at any rate whatsoever.
This user [0] is clearly a bot and has been shadowbanned but some of it's comments get vouched because they're pretty good. I don't see how you solve that problem!
Troll farms hastily adding to their init prompts "don't use emdash when writing comments"
whats the point of botting comments on HN? can someone explain?
doesn't really mean anything, Mac randomly autocorrects dashes to em-dashes (caused me a world of pain once when it did that in a GUID in a config file)
It's a predictable outcome, and it will get worse.
What will/can HN do about it?
Check my history, I get downvoted to hell everytime I truthfully point out AI slop.
Anyone have a lobste.rs invite?
Something about correlation and causation of magic gotcha signals. Text may appear generated to a reader but there's no smoking gun evidence that can disambiguate fact from hypothesis. Even intuition isn't evidence.
Perhaps there needs to be some sort of voluntary ethical disclosure practice to disclaim text as AI-generated with some sort of unusual signifiers. „Lower double quotes perhaps?„
How many of those are bots and how many of those are "fuck you, clankers" humans—like me?
dang, you should consider this an existential threat to hn.
I hate myself for saying this, but HN should consider closing new registrations for a while until we figure out what to do with this.
[dead]
Wow. This made me laugh far harder than I would have thought it would. Just wow.
Weirdly, I learned that it was important to use proper grammar, spelling, and punctuation due to getting repeatedly dunked on in IRC long before the dawn of LLMs. I have no intent of changing, and people thought I was an "old" when I was younger because I texted with correct language, I'm sure people suspect I'm an LLM now. I don't care, and I don't try to guess for other comments either, I care if the content is relevant, accurate, and useful or interesting.