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Comment by ceejayoz

2 months ago

The AI is trained on human input. It uses the dash because humans did.

I'm skeptical this is the reason:

- Chatgpt uses mdashes in basically every answer, while on average humans don't (the average user might not even be aware it exists)

- if the preference for em dashes came from the training set, other AIs would show the same bias (gemini and Le chat don't seem to use them at all)

  • > Chatgpt uses mdashes in basically every answer, while on average humans don't

    I would not be shocked if an aspect to training is bucketing "this is an example of good writing style" into a specific category. Published books - far more likely to have had an editor sprinkle in fancy stuff - may be weightier for some aspects.

    My iPhone converts -- to — automatically. So does Google Docs / Gmail (althought I'm not certain if that's on their end or my Mac's auto-correct kicking in). Plenty of them out there.

    > other AIs would show the same bias

    Unless they've been trained not to use it, now that a bunch of non-technical people believe "emdash = AI, always".

Is that why it uses colorful emoticons, too? Was it trained on Onlyfans updates?

  • It was trained on everything they could get their hands on.

    Yes, it uses emoticons because human writers sometimes use emoticons.

Yeah but a dash, at least on my keyboard is a '-', not the one quoted above.

  • En and em dashes are easily accessible on both my laptop's and phone's keyboard layouts and I like using them, just like putting the ö in coöperate. It's sad if this now makes me look like a robot and I have to use the wrong dashes to be more "human".

    • TIL that some people spell cooperate with an "ö".

      As a Swedish native it really breaks my reading of an English word, but apparently it's supposed to indicate that you should pronounce each "o" separately. Language is fun.

      7 replies →

    • Em dashes are widely used. The diaeresis is only used in The New Yorker and those that copied their style.

  • If I type two dashes—like this—my phone changes it into a special character. Same for three dots…