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- Hacker News
- The "book scanning" hypothesis doesn't sound so bad — but couldn't it simply be OCR bias? I imagine it's pretty easy for OCR software to misrecognize hyphens or other kinds of dashes as em-dashes if the only distinction is some subtle differences in line length.by xg15
- > real humans who like em-dashes have stopped using them out of fear of being confused with AI.
Yeah, this is me. I've always liked good type and typography. 5 or 6 years ago I added em-dash to my keyboard configs to make typing it in convenient - mostly because I just think it just looks nicer. But lately I don't use it much because... AI.
However, in recent weeks someone accused an HN post of mine as being from a bot, despite the fact I used a plain old hyphen and not an em-dash. There was nothing in the post which seemed AI-like except possibly that hyphen. At the time, I realized that person probably just couldn't tell a hyphen from a real em-dash. So maybe that means I have to not use any dash at all.
by mrandish - I think the more correct question is why humans don't use em dashes in the first place while LLMs do all the time. And the short answer to that is, because it's Unicode stuff.
Regular computers for human use only support ASCII in US or ISO-5589-1 in EU still to this day, and Unicode reliant East Asian users turn off Unicode input modes before typing English words, leaving the Asian part mostly in pure Unicode and alphanumeric part pure ASCII. So Unicode-ASCII mixed text is just odd by itself. This in turn makes use of em dashes odd.
Same with emojis. LLMs generate Unicode-mapped tokens directly, so they can vocalize any characters within full Unicode ranges. Humans with keyboards(physical or touchscreen) can mostly only produce what's on them.
by numpad0 - Historically I would see far more em-dashes in capital "L" literature than I would in more casual contexts. LLMs assign more weight to literature than to things like reddit comments or Daily Mail articles.by Fricken
- I would think the most obvious explanation is that they are used as part of the watermark to help OpenAI identify text - i.e. the model isn't doing it at all but final-pass process is adding in statistical patterns on top of what the model actually generates (along with words like 'delve' and other famous GPT signatures)
I don't have evidence that that's true, but it's what I assume and I'm surprised it's not even mentioned as a possibility.
When I studied author profiling, I built models that could identify specific authors just by how often they used very boring words like 'of' and 'and' with enough text, so I'm assuming that OpenAI plays around with some variables like that which would much harder to humans to spot, but probably uses several layers of watermarking to make it harder to strip, which results in some 'obvious' ones too.
by sixhobbits - According to the CEO of Medium, the reason is because their founder, Ev Williams, was a fan of typography and asked that their software automatically convert two hyphens (--) into a single em-dash. Then since Medium was used as a source for high-quality writing, he believes AI picked up a preference for em-dashes based on this writing.by spuz
- It’s a real pity to me that em-dashes are becoming so disliked for their association with AI. I have long had a personal soft spot for them because I just like them aesthetically and functionally. I prided myself on searching for and correctly using em, en, and regular dashes, had a Google docs shortcut for turning `- - -` into `—` and more recently created an Obsidian auto-replacement shortcut that turns `-em` into `—`. Guess I’ll just have to use it sparingly and keep my prose otherwise human.by iansteyn
- My pet theory is similar to the training set hypothesis: em-dashes appear often in prestige publications. The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Economist, and a few others that are considered good writing. Being magazines, there's a lot of articles over time, reinforcing the style. They're also the sort of thing a RLHF person will think is good, not because of the em-dash but because the general style is polished.
One thing I wondered is whether high prestige writing is encoded into the models, but it doesn't seem far fetched that there's various linkages inside the data to say "this kind of thing should be weighted highly."
by lordnacho