Comment by codeflo
1 month ago
To my eyes, this author doesn't write like ChatGPT at all. Too many people focus on the em-dashes as the giveaway for ChatGPT use, but they're a weak signal at best. The problem is that the real signs are more subtle, and the em-dash is very meme-able, so of course, armies of idiots hunt down any user of em-dashes.
Update: To illustrate this, here's a comparison of a paragraph from this article:
> It is a new frontier of the same old struggle: The struggle to be seen, to be understood, to be granted the same presumption of humanity that is afforded so easily to others. My writing is not a product of a machine. It is a product of my history. It is the echo of a colonial legacy, the result of a rigorous education, and a testament to the effort required to master the official language of my own country.
And ChatGPT's "improvement":
> This is a new frontier of an old struggle: the struggle to be seen, to be understood, to be granted the easy presumption of humanity that others receive without question. My writing is not the product of a machine. It is the product of history—my history. It carries the echo of a colonial legacy, bears the imprint of a rigorous education, and stands as evidence of the labor required to master the official language of my own country.
Yes, there's an additional em-dash, but what stands out to me more is the grandiosity. Though I have to admit, it's closer than I would have thought before trying it out; maybe the author does have a point.
The article is engaging. That's true of practically zero GPT output. Particularly once it stretches beyond a single paragraph.
As a reader, I persistently feel like I just zoned out. I didn't. It's just the mind responding to having absorbed zero information despite reading a lot of–at face value–text that seems like it was written with purpose.
The telltale is using lots of words to say nothing at all. LLMs excel at this sort of puffery and some humans do the same.
You're doing it the wrong way imo, if you ask gpt to improve a sentence that's already very polished it will only add grandiosity because what else it could do? For a proper comparison you'd have to give it the most raw form of the thought and see how it would phrase it.
The main difference in the author's writing to LLM I see is that the flourish and the structure mentioned is used meaningfully, they circle around a bit too much for my taste but it's not nearly as boring as reading ai slop which usually stretch a simple idea over several paragraphs
Why can't the LLM refrain from improving a sentence that's already really good? Sometimes I wish the LLM would just tell me, "You asked me to improve this sentence, but it's already great and I don't see anything to change. Any 'improvement' would actually make it worse. Are you sure you want to continue?"
> Why can't the LLM refrain from improving a sentence that's already really good?
Because you told it to improve it. Modern LLMs are trained to follow instructions unquestioningly, they will never tell you "you told me to do X but I don't think I should", they'll just do it even if it's unnecessary.
If you want the LLM to avoid making changes that it thinks are unnecessary, you need to explicitly give it the option to do so in your prompt.
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For me the ChatGPT one is worse due to factual inaccuracies like the "presumption of humanity" which in the human version is "afforded so easily to others" - fair enough and with the LLM "presumption of humanity that others receive without question" which is not true - lots of people get questioned.
Beyond the stylistics bits "history—my history" which I don't really mind what make it bad to me is detachment from reality.
I've almost always used the different dash types as they're meant to be used. I don't care that LLMs write like that — we have punctuation for a reason.
We were also taught in Content Lab at uni to prefer short, punchy sentences. No passive voice, etc. So academia is in some ways pushing that same style of writing.
Armies of idiots hunt down em dashes because they're too stupid to understand the proper use of them.
They are probably like me: if punctuation isn't on my keyboard, I don't use it.
[AltGr][Shift][-]
Without shift it's an en dash (–), with shift an em dash (—). Default X11 mapping for a German keyboard layout, zero config of mine.
>They are probably like me: if punctuation isn't on my keyboard, I don't use it.
LPT: on Android, pressing and holding a punctuation key on the on-screen keyboard reveals additional variations of it — like the em-dash, for example.
This is the №1 feature I expect everyone to know about (and explore!), but, alas, it doesn't appear to be the case even on Hackernews¹.
On Windows, pressing Win+. pops up an on-screen character keyboard with all the symbols one may need (including math symbols and emojis).
MacOS has a similar functionality IIRC.
And let's not forget that software like MS Word automatically correct dashes to em-dashes when appropriate — and some people may simply prefer typing text in a word processor and copy-pasting from it.
Anyway...
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¹ For example, holding "1" yields the superscript version, enabling one to format footnotes properly with less effort than using references in brackets², yet few people choose to do that.
² E.g. [2]
I one of the reasons I love macOS: it is if you hold option.
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⸘WHAT‽
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Yeah, this is what I don't understand, surely people aren't "using" em dashes deliberately. I assumed MS word was just inserting them automatically when the user used a minus symbol between two words. Kind of like angled quotes.
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I'm used to simply using a single dash - and I am surprised that anyone who isn't an AI would feel strongly enough to insist upon the em dash character that they would use them deliberately. I will admit the use of a dash (really an em dash in disguise) in that previous sentence felt clunky, but I just felt I needed to illustrate. I mostly write text in text boxes where a dash or pair of dashes will not be converted to an em dash when appropriate, and I often have double dashes (--long-option-here) auto-converted to emdashes when it is inappropriate, so I really dislike the em dash and basically don't use it. Doesn't really seem to be a useful character in English.