Comment by doctoboggan
1 day ago
The very first sentence:
> Welcome to EdgeAI for Beginners – your comprehensive...
Em dash and the word "comprehensive", nearly 100% proof the document was written by AI.
I use AI daily for my job, so I am not against its use, but recently if I detect some prose is written by AI it's hard for me to finish it. The written word is supposed to be a window into someone's thoughts, and it feels almost like a broken social contract to substitute an AI's "thoughts" here instead.
AI generated prose should be labeled as such, it's the decent thing to do.
Or just by somebody that knows how to use English punctuation properly.
Is it so hard to believe that there are some people in the world capable of hitting option + “-“ on their keyboard (or simply let their editor do it for them)?
I said em dash _and_ the word comprehensive. If you work with LLM generated text enough it gets very easy to see the telltale signs. The emojis at the start of each row in the table are also a dead giveaway.
I am guessing you are one of those people who used em dashes before LLMs came out and are now bitter they are an indicator of LLMs. If that's the case, I am sorry for the situation you find yourself in.
Yes, it’s become a tired trope of a particular kind of LLM luddite to me.
Especially given that there are so many linguistic tics one could pick on instead! “Not x, but y”, the bullseye emoji etc., but instead they get hung up on a typographic character actually widely used, presumably because they assume it only occurs on professionals’ keyboards and nobody would take enough care to use it in casual contexts.
If it makes a difference: it's an en dash used in the readme.
I've been wondering why LLMs seem to prefer the em dash over en dash as I feel like en (or hyphen) is used more frequently in modern text.
2 replies →
It's not an em-dash, it's an en-dash, which is rare in LLM output. Also just stop being insufferable.
> The emojis at the start of each row in the table are also a dead giveaway.
What's up with the green checks, red Xs, rockets, and other stupid emoji in AI slop? Is it an artifact from the cheapest place to do RLHF?
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Doesn't a word document essentially convert dashes to emdashes?
You forget that MS Word loves to substitute things like em dashes in where you don’t want them. The “auto correct” to those directional quotation marks that every compiler barfs on used to be a real peeve with I was forced to use MS junk.
> AI generated prose should be labeled as such, it's the decent thing to do.
The decent thing to do is to prefix the slop with the prompt, so humans don't waste their time reading it.
I don’t really care if it was.
It’s also documentation for an AI product, so I’d kinda expect them to be eating their own dogfood here.