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Comment by PaulKeeble | Hacker News Reader

The dead internet theory is fairly rapidly happening. More and more of the content has been at least significantly produced by AI and its only going to get worse.

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A corollary of the dead internet theory is the phenomenon where people suspect any content to be AI generated. Sometimes one em dash is enough to spark such suspicions and allegations. Not only is fake content falsely labeled as real, real content is increasingly falsely labeled as fake.

Yes emdashes are very much a sign. I stand by this. Why?

What is the key combo to make an emdash?

On a phone keyboard, sure, it's as hard as an accent sign (á, for example), difficult but not twrrible. But on a keyboard? Yeah, no one is typing in Alt combos when literally any other construction will do.

Yes, it's very tell tale in forum posts, but blog posts are often rendered markdown, where it's easy to type `--`. But it's not conclusive evidence in either case! The false positive rate is still not negligible if you only go by em dashes.

Right control (compose), -, -, -. Alt combos are for Windows users who haven't discovered WinCompose, everybody else has some built-in way to enable it in their OS. If they're not on a US-English keyboard, either compose or AltGr is likely already enabled.

> On a phone keyboard, sure, it's as hard as an accent sign (á, for example), difficult but not twrrible. But on a keyboard? Yeah, no one is typing in Alt combos when literally any other construction will do.

For me, --- gets converted to an em-dash (—) while typing, if I have my input method (ELatin) enabled. I'm so used to typing in while working in LaTeX I can easily slip it in elsewhere.

> What is the key combo to make an emdash?

On macOS (and iPadOS if used with certain external keyboards), it has long been `Option` + `Shift` + `-`. Desktop publishing folks memorized this, and other, typographically helpful key combos many years ago.

AltGr - Hypen. How is that different from AltGr - Q for @, AltGr - E for € or even Shift - A? The difficulty is exactly the same.

Amusingly, after a lot of pain this might push us back to the real world :-))

At least when it comes to human interaction (like irl forums etc), I think it has a good chance of happening.

I was wondering about this. Maybe we were not really meant to spend so much time communicating through screens. And if all we do is communicate through screens, does it even matter if it’s AI, a dog, or a person? I know people will jump in and say yes it matters, but if I was never going to meet the person on the other side of a comment it’s hard to get worked up about it.

A good point. I noticed that every time I see a condescending comment like "The war in Ukraine is totally the fault of the West, NATO should have stopped expanding..." etc., some neurons in my brain get activated and I feel obliged to correct this obvious crap using several reasonable and researched argument. But if these are all bots, who cares...

It makes me think if people en masse realize most of their online interactions are with LLMs, they might as well stop using these social platforms for engagement and just switch to totally passive consumption, which gives even less satisfaction and more frustration IMO.

> But if these are all bots, who cares...

I agree, but I’ll add if it’s people you’re never going to meet, also who cares…

damn you are getting downvoted so hard! folks really don't want to leave screens

And it will be increasingly hard to keep the slop of preceding generations out of the training data. The race to the bottom is inevitable.

I don't think that's particularly hard. AI labs are very selective about what they use for training. The days of indiscriminately scraping the entire internet and dumping that in, unfiltered, are long behind us.

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