Comment by akoboldfrying
6 months ago
That's not really how it works.
Gemini tells me that for thousands of years, the swastika was used as "a symbol of positivity, luck and cosmic order". Try drawing it on something now and showing it to people. Is this an effective way to fight Nazism?
I think it's brave to keep using em dashes, but I don't think it's smart, because we human writers who like using them (myself very much included) will never have the mindshare to displace the culturally dominant meaning. At least, not until the dominant forces in AI decide of their own accord that they don't want their LLMs emitting so many of them.
When you say "show it to people" I guess you don't mean the people in India, Japan, etc who still use the symbol for its original purpose?
I think it's safe to assume they meant it within their specific cultural context. They the symbol has different connotations in other cultures doesn't really change the point being made.
My point is just: if a test for what a symbol ‘really means’ depends on choosing an audience that conveniently erases everyone who uses it differently, that’s not describing intrinsic meaning, that’s describing the author’s cultural bubble and bias.
And on em dashes—most people outside tech circles see no “AI fingerprint,” and designers like myself have loved them since early Mac DTP, so the suspicion feels hilariously retroactive and very knee-jerk. So what if somebody thinks my text here is written by a bot?
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I'm not confident that the average person is aware of an em dash nor that it is widely associated with AI; I think the current culturally dominant meaning is just a fat hyphen (which most people just call a dash anyway).
My wife was working from home recently and I overheard a meeting she was having. It's a very non technical field. She and her team were working on a presentation and her boss said "let's use one of those little AI dashes here."
I find that amusing but I know somewhere an English major is crying.
> Gemini tells me that for thousands of years, the swastika was used as "a symbol of positivity, luck and cosmic order". Try drawing it on something now and showing it to people. Is this an effective way to fight Nazism?
I'm happy to change my position when some 13 million people are killed by lunatics that used the em dash as the symbol of their ideology. Until then, I'll keep using it everywhere it's appropriate.
Also, if we don't have the guts to resist even when the stakes are this low and the consequences for our resistance are basically non existent, then society is doomed. We might as well roll on our side and die.
> At least, not until the dominant forces in AI decide of their own accord that they don't want their LLMs emitting so many of them.
It's not a power I'm willing to give them. What if tomorrow they tweak something and those tool start to use a specific word more often? Or a different punctuation sign? What do we do then? Do we constantly adapt, playing whack-a-mole? What if AI starts asking a lot more questions in their writing? Do we stop asking them as a result?
You feel free to adapt and bend. I'm personally not going to do it and if someone starts thinking that I'm using AI to write my thoughts and as a result that's on them.
Hooked cross is Nazi, historians apropriated it to diffent culture to save 'cross'