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Comment by danpalmer | Hacker News Reader

It doesn't to me. I can tell AI writing because it has irrelevant details that don't add facts or colour to the story, but this doesn't have any of that really. The tangents come across as human, not AI doing a bad impression of human.

Things like em-dashes are a really bad way to detect AI because they can be good grammar and improve text readability, same with curly quotes. I use them all the time in my writing, and I wouldn't be surprised if this iOS dev feels similarly as Apple platforms have emphasised this stuff for years.

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Humorously, after re-learning about em-dashes due to their use by AI (an otherwise forgotten part of high-school English), I started using them more often in my writing. They really do look nicer!

As an academic I’ve always used “delve”, too, so at this point I guess my writing is going to be flagged as AI a lot…

I do note that some of the AI slop I’ve received from students include other fancy Unicode characters (superscript numerals, variant Greek letters, blackboard bold R, etc.) that are difficult to type, and which especially would not be used in e.g. code comments. em-dashes at least can be produced by certain word processors or text IMEs automatically, whereas many of these others require specifically looking for the character.

> some of the AI slop I’ve received from students include other fancy Unicode characters... that are difficult to type...

This is the bit I'd still caution against. Yes AI does this, but also writing in some software will correct 1/2 to ½, writing in tools that support MathJax will give you nice greek letters, etc. At university I spent days setting up nice LaTeX setups so that I could get good looking documents, including documents that didn't immediately appear to be LaTeX authored.

I think it's best to focus on the content, the writing quality, whether it targets the right audience, and whether it answers the question or just features a lot of words in the right ballpark. Focusing on the specific words and mechanical features of the text is going to catch out the wrong students, and it's going to be harder to justify from your perspective because you can't score a student badly for using an esoteric unicode character.

    No secret. Just vibes.

Since you know the tells of LLM generated text, you'll know that this is a classic: No X. Just Y.

    Proxyman -- pick your poison.

    And if you're from PureGym reading this—let's talk.

There's a mixture of em dashes joining words and double hyphens spaced between words, suggesting the former were missed in a find and replace job.

"And if you're from [COMPANY] reading this[EM DASH]let's talk" is a classic GPT-ism.

    It's like the API is saying "Hey buddy, I know this is odd, but can you poll me every minute? Thanks, love you too."

    Shame Notifications: "You were literally 100 meters from the gym and walked past it"

    It's just a ZIP archive with delusions of grandeur

Clear examples of fluff. Not only do these fail to "add facts or colour to the story", they actually detract from it.

I agree with you that em dashes in isolation are not indicative, but the prose here is dripping with GPT-speak.

OP here! Appreciate you actually pulling examples instead of just dropping "this is AI".

> There's a mixture of em dashes joining words and double hyphens spaced between words, suggesting the former were missed in a find and replace job.

The em dash conspiracy in the comments today is amazing -- I type double hyphens everywhere, and some apps (e.g a Telegram bot I made for drafts, or the macOS' built-in auto-correct) replace them with em dashes automatically–I never bother to edit those out (ok, now this one I put here on purpose).

> It's just a ZIP archive with delusions of grandeur > Clear examples of LLM fluff that don't "add facts or colour to the story".

Yeah, no that's fair enough, should've known better than to attempt humour on HN.

I've got to say though, pkpass is a ZIP archive, and no ZIP archive should require one to spend 3 hours to sign it.

I enjoyed the humour. (We’re heading towards a sad world if any attempt at levity in an article is interpreted as evidence of LLM usage by critical killjoys.)

Edit: total random thought: something in your prose shouted ‘Brit’ to me very quickly. Is it possible that part of this is simply cultural differences in humour and writing, and over-interpretation of subtle differences as evidence of LLM use?

Or do LLMs just write in a subtlety more British style because, well, Shakespeare and Dickens and Keats and Milton? Or does ChatGPT just secretly channel PG Wodehouse?

Authors use humour as a form of connection with their audience. It's a way of saying hey I'm a human and I have the same human experiences as you dear reader. Take the first paragraph for example:

> Wednesday, 11:15 AM. I'm at the PureGym entrance doing the universal gym app dance. Phone out, one bar of signal that immediately gives up because apparently the building is wrapped in aluminum foil

It says, "Hey I'm a human who goes to the gym and experiences the same frustrations as you do". Now imagine for a second this paragraph was written by AI. The AI has never been to the gym, the AI doesn't feel impatience trying to pass through the turnstile, the AI has never experienced the anxiety of a dodgy internet connection in a large commercial building. The purpose of any humour in this paragraph is completely undermined if you assume it was actually written by AI.

So please don't conflate being anti-LLM with being anti-humour. It's just the opposite. We want humour because we want to feel a connection with our fellow humans and for the same reason we should also want writing that comes from a human, not a machine.

> So please don't conflate being anti-LLM with being anti-humour. It's just the opposite.

I'm not.

I'm trying to analyse, or hypothesise, why this author's particular writing style seemed to trigger people's nascent LLM warning heuristics.

I considered the humour, because, well, other people brought it up. From the surrounding discussion, it seemed that the jocular writing style was one of the points generating suspicion.

Does sound like some people just don't get the humour which is fine, personally I liked it (but then I am british).

British people do tend to have a fairly humorous indirect way of communicating that can take some getting used to for people from other cultures, but that doesn't mean we're all secretly LLMs

FWIW I enjoyed the article and the humour, and I don't know where the AI conspiracy is coming from – I wish I could get the AI to write copy this good. So thanks, that was a fun read!

> I don't know where the AI conspiracy is coming from

It has become a trope to call AI writing to any text which includes an em-dash.

FWIW, I found "It's just a ZIP archive with delusions of grandeur" pretty funny and for me it was an example of a human adding (relevant) colour to the content.

I swear some folks have just been normalised to the shit writing that AI does so much that they look for tricks like punctuation rather than just reading the damn text. Although maybe they're just blatting the whole thing into ChatGPT and asking it to summarise, or determine if it's AI generate.

not sure why you're being downvoted here, you're completely right

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