logoalt Hacker News

1matintoday at 6:42 AM3 repliesview on HN

Whenever you see a lot of long dashes (—) in a writing, there's a high chance Claude has written it.


Replies

apt-apt-apt-apttoday at 7:27 AM

Perhaps – but it's a useful grammatical construct in everyday use, handy for structuring sentences.

And with the prevalence of AI, it rubs off on the smelly humans, who also find it useful and use it more as a result. (I used an en dash here instead of an em one – also valid, easier to type, and shorter).

veidrtoday at 7:11 AM

This heuristic is commonly believed — and expressed on this website — but is idiotic. Plenty of people have known how to use em dashes when writing on a computer since the 1980s. (This was true even before UTF-8 was invented to make extended characters work across platforms; instead of ⌘⇧-hyphen, we'd just type "--" to approximate it.)

The reason LLMs tend to use a lot of em dashes is that the human-authored texts they were trained on used a lot of em dashes.

show 3 replies
sevgtoday at 7:05 AM

In this case, the emdashes are just tip of the iceberg. The writing is so Claude that it’s painful to read (and in fact I stopped reading to save my mental health).