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Comment by benatkin | Hacker News Reader

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Wow. What a good giveaway.

I wonder what others there are.

I occasionally use bullet points, emdashes (unicode, single, and double hyphens) and words like "delve". I hate it think these are the new heuristics.

I think AI is a useful tool (especially image and video models), but I've already had folks (on HN [1]!) call out my fully artisanal comments as LLM-generated. It's almost as annoying as getting low-effort LLM splurge from others.

Edit: As it turns out, cow-orkers isn't actually an LLMism. It's both a joke and a dictation software mistake. Oops.

[1] most recently https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44482876

Use two dashes instead of an actual em dash. ChatGPT, at least, cannot do the same--it just can't.

As a frequent user of two dashes.. I hate how people now associate it with AI.

Also, that "cow-orkers" doesn't look like AI-generated slop at all..? Just scrolling down a bit shows that most of them are three years and older.

Conventionally, in various tools that take plain text as input, two dashes is an en-dash, and three dashes is an em-dash.

It can't use two dashes? Is that like how Data couldn't use contractions (except he did)?

I've asked it before, "please rewrite that but replace the em dashes with double hyphens", and then it says "sure, here you go", and continues to use em dashes.

Were you using the web interface? If so, that’s likely why. It renders output dynamically on the frontend.

I bet if you did the same through the API, you’d get the results you want.

Yes, I was using the web interface.

ChatGPT: "Hold my beer..."

I thought the convention for en-dash is two hyphens straddled between spaces, and three hyphens without spacer for em-dash?

Maybe I'm misunderstanding - but I don't think LLM's say cow-orkers. Or is that what you mean?

As this error seems to be going back a lot longer then LLMs existed (17 yrs), it could be an auto in-correct situation.

Might be incorrectly saved in some spell check software and occasionally rearing it's head

https://ask.metafilter.com/15649/coworkers-why/amp

This goes back a loooooong while.

Oh I see the confusion then. It's not an error, it's a joke, and a very old one at that. Like saying Micro$oft.

Give away for what, old farts? That link contains a comment citing the jargon file which in turn says that the term is an old Usenet meme.

Soon HN is going to be flooded with blogs about people trying and failing miserably to find AI signal from noisy online discussions with examples like this one.

How is that a “giveaway”? The search turns up results from 7 years ago before LLMs were a thing? More than likely it’s auto correct going astray. I can’t imagine an LLM making that mistake

I like to use em-dashes as well (option-shift-hyphen on my macbook). I've seen people try to prompt LLMs to not have em-dashes, I've been in forums where as soon as you type in an em-dash it will block the submit button and tell you not to use AI.

Here's my take: these forums will drive good writers away or at least discourage them, leaving discourses the worse for it. What they really end up saying — "we don't care whether you use an LLM, just remove the damn em-dash" — indicates it's not a forum hosting riveting discussions in the first place.

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