I miss using em dashes

Approximately everyone is online. What percentage of those people do you think are even familiar with the meme that em dashes == LLM assistance, much less feel strongly enough to complain or attack you over your punctuation choices?

But because the average person on the street would give blank stares about compilers, we can conclude that compilers aren't important /s

I use them occasionally and have never been falsely accused of being an LLM.

The stakes are a bit different for students unfortunately, who who’ll have their writing passed through some snake oil AI detector arbitrarily. This is unfortunate because “learning how not to trigger an AI detector” is a totally useless skill.

Generally, I don’t think we need AI detection. We need dumb bullshit detection. Humans and LLMs can both generate that. If people can use an LLM in a way that doesn’t generate dumb bullshit, I’m happy to read it.

Same. Years ago I took the time to learn the difference between an em-dash, an en-dash, and a hyphen and I'll continue to use them regardless of what AI does.

I don't use AI in my writing. If I were still in school would I be tempted? Probably. But in work and personal writing? Never crosses my mind.

I agree completely with this as a human reader - but do wonder about the gradual codification of these markers in systems that will have increasingly have LLM detection as a standard feature, as frequently and obviously enabled as spam detectors were on blog comments back when blogs had comments.

Certainly! I’m right there with you.

Putting aside the claim that "LLM output [...] is almost always not worth reading"[1], the whole issue here is that this supposed ability of determining whether or not content is AI-generated doesn't exist. Is it really a valuable life skill to decide whether or not you want to read something based solely on its density of em dashes?

Of course there are cases where you can tell that some text is almost certainly LLM output, because it matches what ChatGPT might reply with to a basic prompt. You can also tell when a piece of writing is copied and pasted from Wikipedia, or a copy of a page of Google results. Would any of that somehow be more worth reading if the author posted a video of themselves carefully typing it up by hand?

1: You're assuming a specific type of output in a specific type of context. If LLM output were never worth reading, ChatGPT would have no users.

I don't see that provenance matters per se. LLM-assisted writing is comparatively cheaper than producing the same writing without an LLM, but not inherently cheap in absolute terms.

If someone who typically bills $500/hr spends 30 - 60 minutes on a comment or blog post, that's still $250 - 500 worth of their time invested regardless of whether or not an LLM was involved. An LLM is comparatively cheaper than hiring a human editor or research assistant, but it's not negative cost.

Likewise, prompting ChatGPT with "write a blog post about bees" may be cheaper than hiring someone off Fiverr to respond to the exact same prompt, but in either case the resulting content will be low-value (yet still higher-value than the string "write a blog post about bees") because its source material was cheap. The fact that the latter version would have been written by a human is incidental.

Just to clarify, I didn't dismiss the article. I'm agreeing with one of the author's points that we shouldn't dumb down our writing to please a vocal minority.

Right, but that's bad writing because it's awkward to read and/or overly cliched. The fact that it may have been AI-generated is incidental. It would still be bad writing if someone happened to write in the exact same style by hand.

> In the 20th century, there were two spaces after an end of sentence period. (I still do that.)

Only if you used a typewriter. I was using (La)TeX in the twentieth (1990s), and it defaulted to a rough equivalent of 1.5 spaces (see \spacefactor).

Two ('full') space characters were added because of (tele)typewriters and their fixed width fonts, and this was generally not used in 'properly' published works with proportional typefaces; see CMoS:

* https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/O...

Bringhurst's The Elements of Typographic Style (§2.1.4) concurs:

* https://readings.design/PDF/the_elements_of_typographic_styl...

* https://webtypography.net/2.1.4

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Typographic_St...

Very annoying how HTML changes your two spaces into one space.

I eventually gave up on this, but I always favored it because a period with two spaces after it very clearly designated the end of a sentence, as opposed to something like an abbreviation. It made parsing English just a little bit easier.

When I was growing up (90s), we were taught that either one or two spaces was acceptable practice.

I think Google Docs does this automatically.

I've been called out on this by coworkers in code review. It's mildly infuriating.

Would you wear an original swastika[1] on your baseball hat?

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika

Which is to say, we all compromise.

I'd hate to lose my em- and en-dashes, but the original post seems to misuse en-dashes where hyphens belong (it could just be a font issue, but no matter).

> from Office Space, not the singer)

I believe you meant "not the no-talent ass clown".

Sorry people are downvoting you. I laughed.

I also love pizza, it's my comfort food. You see a problem here?

Wow. Am I the only one who reads all those sentences differently? Either the length of the pause or the intonation is different to me. But I wouldn't be able to explain it...