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Comment by kenjackson | Hacker News Reader

The most frustrating part for me is that this is how I used to write. I was always doing, "Why X works, but Y doesn't" and stuff like that. I may have seemed trite or pompous (or both) in the past, but now it seems like I'm copying an LLM -- which actually feels worse. One thing I haven't seen ChatGPT do much of is use sound-effects, so swoosh here we go with my new writing style schwing!

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I feel you. I've been using en-dash in my writing for decades, but finding myself removing them now for fear of being mistaken for an LLM. (They tend to use em-dash, but I don't think people are going to distinguish between – and —.)

Do you think pre-AI writing is going to become really valuable because it is free of any AI assistance? If we all start using AI to assist in writing, then pre-AI writing may become important, similar to pre-atomic steel (i.e., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel)

>Do you think pre-AI writing is going to become really valuable because it is free of any AI assistance?

Serious question: Do you think old pictures are valuable because they are free of photoshop? Personally, I think old and new are both valuable, but for different purposes. Technology gave us new capabilities with new hope

Not the user you asked, but: Yes, it seems obvious that old pictures are valuable because they are free of photoshop. Not that this means that they are free of manipulation though, c.f. the famous picture of stalin at the river with/out his fellows.

I predict in the future a humans.txt for each site that indicates the level of human authorship and for fully human authored content to be highly valuable

I predict that this will not exist, given the existence of lying.

It's already important, for various reasons. E.g. I love older electronics books where they explain things in a very thorough manner (maybe because they had more time?). But of course reading older books is full of traps, in some subjects you need to be more careful than when analyzing the output of an LLM.

That is what I mourn the most. They were my punctuation get-out-of-jail free card.

I didn’t love them enough to figure out how to type them without doing two dash’s in Word and then backspacing out of one and hitting space again — but damnit, I miss it.

Before the LLM craze I didn't even know — was specifically different than just -, and I used it in the same way. But now I notice specifically when people use either, and when people use -- instead.

I think people do - it's one of the main ways you can reliably spot AI-generated content. M-dashes are so fat they stick out like a sore thumb.

em-dashes and en-dashes are used for completely different purposes, so why would they be confused?

En-dashes, set off with spaces, are an acceptable substitute for unspaced em-dashes in some style guides. See for example this Canadian government guide: https://nos-langues.canada.ca/en/writing-tips-plus/en-dash.

The use seems to be more common in British than in American English.

I would think to most people, (myself included!), it's just a 'dash'. A sentence was written with a dash - you could just ingest and read past it, like a comma.

Not saying this is accurate usage, maybe just real world usage.

I would hope most people can distinguish between the really short dash and the longer forms, even if they don't know any of the rules around them. But n versus m I don't expect people to notice.

I’m not sure I’m representative of “most people” in this respect (I have always used both n and m dashes), but I personally find the difference between n and m dashes bigger and more noticeable than the difference between regular and n dashes.

Because most people are ESL and really don't care.

I didn't even know there are multiple types of dashes.

I did know about multiple types of quotes because they kept breaking code on blogs. Still didn't care, but at least I learned how to spot and fix them.

Really looking forward to having the wrong kind of dash in code, but at least with current tech that seems like it won't happen.

Why wouldn't they. Never studied them. Never even thought twice about the dashes in a sentence. Didn't realize they were different till like a few months ago when everybody suddenly started focusing on how "AI" it makes everything look

And of course, the reason that ChatGPT sounds like that is that it's what a whole lot of explanatory expert blog posts did, and so when ChatGPT is told to talk like that, that's what it does.

It’s more a factor of how they structure the desired output. They follow a template instead of trying to come up with something on the fly

Just wait until someone makes a filter to turn emojis into sound effects.

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