- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- Technology@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- Technology@programming.dev
This is a list of writing and formatting conventions typical of AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, with real examples taken from Wikipedia articles and drafts. Its purpose is to act as a field guide in helping detect undisclosed AI-generated content.
As a long time fan of the em dash, it is truly a tragedy that using it is associated with AI. I was heavily using it before LLMs were a big thing. It allows spacing in contexts where commas and others just won’t let you. Am I to just incorrectly use a hyphen instead? Horrible 0/10
I think thats a reasonable take. But it surely depends on your personal style how often you use this type of dash.
For me, regarding every text that contains em dashes is clearly unreasonable, but using it as one of many indicators is perfectly fine.
I was overusing them before too :(
Hypothetically have had to be told that three em dashes is too many in one sentence by someone proofreading. It’s just such a good punctuation. Alas
I also use way too many em dashes (usually as double hyphens), but I also overuse parentheses and commas and just overly long sentence structures. I would like to think that my style remains pretty distinct from LLM output style at the moment.
The thing that really worries me is that as they stop using weird identifiable quirks like em dashes and emoji, it could be that the identifiable trait that remains is eerily consistent grammar. It used to be that people unconsciously treated extremely grammatical text as authoritative, regardless of its actual merit; as such, teachers spent literal decades drilling into me the habit of avoiding grammatical errors. Now that could end up instead just making folks think I’m a robot, and thus to be ignored.
I guess the actual robots will probably talk less about their neurotic concerns, though, so I’ve got that going for me, which is nice.
I just use a double hyphen and assume everyone knows I was too lazy to type the actual em dash
I type the full phrase “em dash” so everyone knows I have ample spare time and am choosing to spend it painstakingly hamecrafting my work
Microsoft Word, LibreOffice, etc. will convert a double hyphen into an em dash. That’s how I’ve always typed mine out within papers.
Speaking as a Brit: using a capital letter after a colon or a semi-colon just looks weird to me. I’m continuing a thought, not starting another mid-sentence. Using an em-dash - or even just a hyphen, I think it’s an acceptable alternative when you’ve not got adequate input available - lets me show a slight change of thought mid-sentence in a trans-Atlantic way.
Also, fuck AI.
Funny. I’m German, and in German it’s actually a rule that the word after the “:” must be capitalized. I always have to go back through my English writing and un-capitalize those words because I just can’t get used to not doing it.
Oh, interesting. A couple hundred years again, it used to be the done thing in written English to capitalise every noun in a sentence, German-style. The Yanks have “in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility”, for example. We’ve mostly stopped doing that now. There were a lot of German immigrants to the early US; whether they’ve taken your influence on colons, or whether it’s just pre-standardisation English and it needed to be one way or another…
We’d consider excessive capitalisation, or worse, running all-caps, to be the sign of a diseased mind, now. Not naming any names.
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We’re all suffering from this, but it’s better to cut off our tails than our heads.