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Comment by ajkjk | Hacker News Reader

found the guy who didn't know about em dashes before this year

also your question implies a bad assumption even if you disclaim it. if you don't want to imply a bad assumption the way to do that is to not say the words, not disclaim them

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didn't even notice the em dashes to be honest, i noticed the contrast framing in the second paragraph and the "It's impressive how" for its conclusion.

as for the "assumption" bit, yeah fair enough. was just curious of AI usage online, this wasn't meant to be a dig at anyone as i know people use it for translations, cleaning up prose etc

No offense taken, but realize that good number of us folks who have learned English as a second language have been taught in this way (especially in an academic setting). LLMs' writing are like that of people, not the other way around.

wouldn't say that... they're very distinctly not like people, that's (part of) the problem. But I don't think the difference is measured exactly in the choices of words and punctuation. It's more like... you can tell, reading AI writing, that it's not "sincere"; no person would want to say what the AI is saying, because it feels fake and disingenuous. The phrases and em dashes and whatever else are just the method for this effect. Real people use the same phrases but with real intent to communicate behind them, and the result is different in a way that is curiously easy to detect.

The hatred mostly comes from TTS models not properly pausing for them.

“NO EM DASHES” is common system prompt behavior.

You know, I didn’t think about that, but you’re right. I have seen so many AI narrations where it reads the dash exactly like a hyphen, actually maybe slightly reducing the inter-word gap. Odd the kinds of “easy” things such as complicated and advanced system gets wrong.

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