Comment by n4r9
1 month ago
This may be true. I personally didn't get any hint of LLM usage from their writing. Even where they use em-dashes it's for stuff like this:
> there is - in my observational opinion - a rather dark and insidious slant to it
That feels too authentic and personal to be any of the current generation of LLMs.
ChatGPT would have used an actual em dash instead of a hyphen
Add "Always use dash instead of em dash" to the developer/system prompt, and that's never an "issue" anymore. Seems people forget LLMs are really just programmable (sometimes inaccurate) computers. Whatever you can come up with a signal, someone can come up with an instruction to remove.
That doesn't work, they beat it so hard into ChatGPT it won't always listen to you about it.
You can't stop it from doing the "if you like I can <three different dumb followup ideas>" thing in every reply either.
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Except for your poor editor who then has to manually replace your hyphens with proper em dashes. Still, if you're already disrespecting your editor enough to feed them AI slop...
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They're really not programmable computers! (Bad mental model is bad.)
But yes the current commercial ones are somewhat controllable, much of the time.
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And many of us human writers would have done so, too, since we've had to learn the—not very obscure—keyboard shortcut to insert an emdash.
I would use an actual em dash if there were a keyboard key for it. On my macbook, I have an an action script set up on the touchbar for emdash and a few other unicodey glyphs, but the (virtual) buttons are like 2 inches wide each so I can't fit more than 5 or 6 across it. Sucks.
On Mac emdash is option-shift-hypen (aka shift-endash, aka capital endash)
In Menlo font (Chrome on Mac's default monospace font, used for HN comments) em-dash(—) and en-dash (–) use the same glyph, though.
Double hyphen works in many places