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Comment by doctoboggan | Hacker News Reader

The very first sentence:

> Welcome to EdgeAI for Beginners – your comprehensive...

Em dash and the word "comprehensive", nearly 100% proof the document was written by AI.

I use AI daily for my job, so I am not against its use, but recently if I detect some prose is written by AI it's hard for me to finish it. The written word is supposed to be a window into someone's thoughts, and it feels almost like a broken social contract to substitute an AI's "thoughts" here instead.

AI generated prose should be labeled as such, it's the decent thing to do.

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Or just by somebody that knows how to use English punctuation properly.

Is it so hard to believe that there are some people in the world capable of hitting option + “-“ on their keyboard (or simply let their editor do it for them)?

I said em dash _and_ the word comprehensive. If you work with LLM generated text enough it gets very easy to see the telltale signs. The emojis at the start of each row in the table are also a dead giveaway.

I am guessing you are one of those people who used em dashes before LLMs came out and are now bitter they are an indicator of LLMs. If that's the case, I am sorry for the situation you find yourself in.

If it makes a difference: it's an en dash used in the readme.

I've been wondering why LLMs seem to prefer the em dash over en dash as I feel like en (or hyphen) is used more frequently in modern text.

In my experience the em dash is still correctly used, the modern style has just evolved to put a space around it.

So:

* fragment a—fragment b (em dash, no space) = traditional

* fragment a — fragment B (em dash with spaces) = modern

* fragment a -- fragment b (two hyphens) = acceptable sub when you can’t get a proper em to render

But en-dashes are for numeric ranges…

em dash plus spaces is quite rare in English style guides. It’s usually either an em dash and no spaces or an en dash with them.

Apologies, now that I've been Beider-Meinhoff'd, I've realized you're correct and I've been misreading en dashes and em dashes. Thank you!

It's not an em-dash, it's an en-dash, which is rare in LLM output. Also just stop being insufferable.

> The emojis at the start of each row in the table are also a dead giveaway.

What's up with the green checks, red Xs, rockets, and other stupid emoji in AI slop? Is it an artifact from the cheapest place to do RLHF?

It's the linkedin post recommendation AFAIK. The LI algo pushed such posts to the top before. So my leap of thought is that somebody at MS decided that top LI posts is the go-to structure for "good text".

I have no proof, sorry.

Imagine if we spent a trillion dollars to turn the internet into infinite degraded copies of LinkedIn. Business influencer spam generated by robots for other robots, with occasional corrections by the cheapest English speakers in the world. That's dark.

Yes, it’s become a tired trope of a particular kind of LLM luddite to me.

Especially given that there are so many linguistic tics one could pick on instead! “Not x, but y”, the bullseye emoji etc., but instead they get hung up on a typographic character actually widely used, presumably because they assume it only occurs on professionals’ keyboards and nobody would take enough care to use it in casual contexts.

You forget that MS Word loves to substitute things like em dashes in where you don’t want them. The “auto correct” to those directional quotation marks that every compiler barfs on used to be a real peeve with I was forced to use MS junk.

> AI generated prose should be labeled as such, it's the decent thing to do.

The decent thing to do is to prefix the slop with the prompt, so humans don't waste their time reading it.

Doesn't a word document essentially convert dashes to emdashes?

I don’t really care if it was.

It’s also documentation for an AI product, so I’d kinda expect them to be eating their own dogfood here.

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