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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

The AI is trained on human input. It uses the dash because humans did.

I'm skeptical this is the reason:

- Chatgpt uses mdashes in basically every answer, while on average humans don't (the average user might not even be aware it exists)

- if the preference for em dashes came from the training set, other AIs would show the same bias (gemini and Le chat don't seem to use them at all)

> Chatgpt uses mdashes in basically every answer, while on average humans don't

I would not be shocked if an aspect to training is bucketing "this is an example of good writing style" into a specific category. Published books - far more likely to have had an editor sprinkle in fancy stuff - may be weightier for some aspects.

My iPhone converts -- to — automatically. So does Google Docs / Gmail (althought I'm not certain if that's on their end or my Mac's auto-correct kicking in). Plenty of them out there.

> other AIs would show the same bias

Unless they've been trained not to use it, now that a bunch of non-technical people believe "emdash = AI, always".

Is that why it uses colorful emoticons, too? Was it trained on Onlyfans updates?

It was trained on everything they could get their hands on.

Yes, it uses emoticons because human writers sometimes use emoticons.

Yeah but a dash, at least on my keyboard is a '-', not the one quoted above.

If I type two dashes—like this—my phone changes it into a special character. Same for three dots…

En and em dashes are easily accessible on both my laptop's and phone's keyboard layouts and I like using them, just like putting the ö in coöperate. It's sad if this now makes me look like a robot and I have to use the wrong dashes to be more "human".

TIL that some people spell cooperate with an "ö".

As a Swedish native it really breaks my reading of an English word, but apparently it's supposed to indicate that you should pronounce each "o" separately. Language is fun.

As a native English speaker, it also breaks my reading of "cooperate". Never seen it before. I think parent is just annoyingly eccentric for the sake of it.

Most commonly seen in naïve, and the New Yorker

I admit that latter part is just for whimsy, because I think it looks fun. The dashes I like for their aesthetics and if that makes me eccentric then so be it. They shouldn't distract anyone's reading, or at least they didn't use to before LLMs.

Using umlauts to signal that a vowel is pronounced separately is common in a number of languages (like Dutch).

Yeah, I know.

It's just confusing for us poor Swedes since "ö" in Swedish is a separate letter with its own pronunciation, and not a somehow-modified "o". Always takes an extra couple of seconds to remember how "Motörhead" is supposed to be said. :)

That kind of use technically makes it a diaeresis, not an umlaut.

But it's not used as an Umlaut here, that's exactly what's confusing. Here this is used as a trema/diaeresis.

Em dashes are widely used. The diaeresis is only used in The New Yorker and those that copied their style.

If you’re using the dash on your keyboard (which is a “hyphen–minus” character) in place of a en dash or em dash, then you are using the wrong character. That’s fine — it’s certainly more convenient, and I wouldn’t call you out on it — but it’s silly to assume that other people don’t use the correct characters.

https://www.grammarly.com/blog/punctuation-capitalization/da...

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