Amdash – Human only punctuation mark

That people assume proper use of punctuation and clear writing are signals of AI just tells you about the sorry state of education. And it’s only going downhills from here.

You can tell I’m not AI because I use the british-style parenthetical separator ` – ` (space en-dash space) instead of the American em dash. It’s subtle, but even the smallest acts of rebellion count.

Perhaps this time of adversity will turn a bunch of formatting and type nerds into e e cummings - https://poets.org/poem/r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-g-r

Happening the same here too. I usually write to the point and regularly number or bullet my key points. I also love to use “–”, Oxford comma, and curl all of my quotes. Now, I’ve to prove that I’m not using AI with my emails.

The other day I wrote a long (a couple paragraphs) iMessage to 2 friends. I used bullet points ("-") in it and it was detailed. After I sent it I got the response "Did AI write this?" to which I was rather annoyed. Not only that a friend of mine would think I would send them AI Slop is a private group message but also that somewhat implies "I don't think you wrote this".

Now I know they were partly joking and they are the type of person that might not see sending AI-generated response as rude/distasteful (like I do) but it did make me sad for the state of the world. I'm sure many people just slap AI slop into all sorts of conversations with people they call "friends", I don't get it. I use AI for things I don't want to do, talking to my friends is not one of those things.

I’ve started writing “--“ and not letting autocorrect change it to be “—“

Yes, there's an obvious negative feedback loop to the effectiveness of this. The designer can't have realised that all symbols are just as opaque as any others to an LLM.

According to Unicode's tenets, if it was used to any great degree then they are obligated to support it, are they not? Their mission is to make it possible to encode any writing glyph humans have ever used to communicate in writing or so I thought.

Interesting point, though perhaps a nightmare for screen readers and accessibility.

spelling and grammar mistakes

The theory is that it isn’t present in the corpus of training data, so AI won’t use it. Maybe sort of kind of true, but probably more performance art than actual proposal.

In the unlikely event there was uptake, websites would regex emdashes into amdashes to appear human, AI would train on that, and we’d be looking for a different secret signal.

I believe it's because the actual text behind the font would say "Here's a statementam-and here's a diversionam-and back to the original statement."

Problem is, it's only useful if you're using those specific fonts. Now I've gotta teach my grandpa how to install a font and switch to using it on every single device and application.

I think it's because it's a font ligature rather than a code pointam-it wouldn't be readable to an AI.

This is not a technical solution to AI slop. It's an artistic expression of frustration with AI slop. The fact that it isn't a solution can be read as part of the artistic objection that there doesn't seem to be a solution to the problem.

It's a joke?...

You might be taking this for more than it is -- at best a joke, at worst a (strikingly effective) publicity stunt.

There is the possibility that informally and in certain contexts people agree to this use this as a sign of human writing. Obviously malicious actors in malicious contexts will not follow such a practice, but it might be useful in environments of high trust.