Comment by Arainach | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Arainach | Hacker News Reader

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It's not that simple. LLMs were trained on lots of writing, and the "LLM voice" resembles in many ways good English prose, or at least effective public communications voice.

For years, even before LLMs, there have been trends of varied popularity to, for lack of a better word, regress - intentionally omitting capitalization, punctuation, or other important details which convey meaning. I rejected those, and likewise I reject the call to omit the emdash or otherwise alter my own manner of speaking - a manner cultivated through 30+ years of reading and writing English text.

If content is intellectually lacking, call that out, but I am absolutely sick of people calling out writing because they "think it's LLM-written". I'm sick of review tools giving false positives and calling students' work "AI written" because they used eloquent words instead of Up Goer Five[0] vocabulary.

I am just as afraid of a society where we all dumb ourselves down to not appear as machines as I am of one where machine-generated spam overtakes all human messaging.

[0] https://xkcd.com/1133/

> "LLM voice" resembles in many ways good English prose, or at least effective public communications voice.

It does not resembles that. It is usually grammatically correct writing, but it is also pretty ineffective writing bad writing with good gramar.

One of the most common criticisms is the use of the emdash. This is a classic bit of English prose that is not problematic except as a stereotype used to dismiss writing for form rather than for content.

Let's grab a few books off the shelf (literally).

Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has four emdashes on the very first page:

> It is also the story of a book, a book called THGTTG - not an Earth book, never...

Isaac Asimov's classic The Last Question: three emdashes on the first page (as printed in The Complete Stories, Volume I)

> ...they knew what lay behind the cold, clicking, flashing face -- miles and miles of face -- of that giant computer.

Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves: Three emdashes on page 1

> Much like its subject, The Navidson Record itself is also uneasily contained -- whether by category or lection.

Robert Caro, Master of the Senate: Five emdashes on page one

> Its drab tan damask walls...were unrelieved by even a single touch of color -- no painting, no mural -- or, seemingly, by any other ornament

Other pages 1s:

* Murakami - 1Q84: 1

* Murray/Cox - Apollo: 1

* Meadows - Thinking in Systems: 1

* Dostoyevsky - The Brothers Karamazov (Pevear/Volokhonsky translation): 4

* Caro - The Power Broker: 5

* Hofstadter - Godel, Escher, Bach - 3

Honestly, when I started this post I expected to have to dig deeper than page 1. The emdash is an important part of English-language literature and I reject the claim that we should ignore all writing that contains it.

When a drunk chef dumps way too much salt into my ramen, the fact that good ramen also contains (more tastefully applied) salt redeems nothing!

No one is asking that we reject all prose with emdash. Not all emdash-users are LLMs, but many LLMs are profligate emdash-users, so adjust your priors accordingly.

Secondarily, I think there's a part of the discourse missing: the presence of a syntactic emdash in a sentence on the internet is not itself a strong signal of LLM-writing - but the presence of an actual emdash glyph (—) should raise some eyebrows, esp. in fora that aren't commonly authored in rich text editors (here, twitter, ...)

Before LLMs, the em-dash glyph was a decent tell simply that... the author was using a Mac, because it's a simple and easy-to-remember (or even guess!) key-combo on there. Not that you can't type it on other keyboards, but the Mac one for whatever reason had a combo of users-who-wanted-to-type-it and layout-that-makes-it-easy that resulted in a high proportion of correct em-dash employers being Mac users.

(option-underscore, or option-shift-dash if you prefer to think of it that way)

On iOS, you can type it by simply holding down on the "dash" button then selecting the em-dash from the list of options it presents. It may also correct double-dash to em-dash a lot of the time, not sure.

I have used the correct em-dash everywhere I can for over a decade, which amounts to nearly everywhere.

i think it depends on what is meant by "good" or "bad". llmism may not be substantive writing, but it's approachable writing. a McDonald's lunch of familiar prose with likewise nationwide popularity and nutritional value.

Well that isn't what I am suggesting. I'm suggesting people ditch x. Reddit. Probably also ditch hn in the next couple months. If you can run a headless agent to post somewhere, just don't bother visiting that site, honestly a great rule of thumb right there.

That should leave you with media sources like nyt and your local library, which seems healthier to me. And maybe it might encourage a new type of forum to emerge where there is some decentralized vetting that you are a human, like verifying by inputting the random hash posted outside the local maker space.

> like nyt

I hope editorial departments everywhere are taking careful notes on the ars technica fiasco. Agree there's room for some kind of quick "verified human" checkmark. It would at least give readers the ability to quickly filter, and eliminate all the spurious "this sounds like vibeslop" accusations.

On HN o Reddit you can occasionally read genuine opinions from real people. On newspaper 100% of text is trying to manipulate you.

I'm not sure how you can accept the first point but believe the second point. If you believe there is nuance in reddit there is nuance in the news as well. You think a local sports column is manipulating me? The answer is of course no, unless you want to win a gold medal in mental gymnastics trying to equate a sports column to nation state sponsored agit prop.

The bad part is that people may start writing a bit worse on purpose, just so they don't get read as AI.

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