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Comment by topynate | Hacker News Reader

I've noticed them trying to creep into my writing. It doesn't help that I was a heavy em-dash user ten years before GPT-3.

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I’ve always loved em dashes…very sad they’re a hallmark of LLM slop now. That and trios in arguments. Maybe I’m part LLM?

Some of us been writing texts on the public internet for decades, and humans invented machines trained on our texts, so suddenly the text we write now sounds like robots? Only way to win is to stop caring, let the people believe you're a LLM if so be it.

LLM writing style is trained in by data labellers, it’s not just emergent behavior from being trained on internet texts.

Ultimately it's a mix-match of everything, including whatever data the pre-training uses and how exactly they do the post-training. I don't think you can say there is a single factor that decides the writing style, unless you have some particular insight into some specific pipeline. Generally though, they output text that looks like the human text they ingested for training.

This isn’t just em-dashes—it's the empty phrase that includes both whatever the contrastive construction is called and an “Honestly”. It might have been human written but the density of LLM flags is undeniable.

Honesty has become a big tell, especially if its brutal. I'm not sure if it's getting worse or if I'm becoming more sensitive, but if I'm being brutally honest I can barely stand using LLMs anymore with their tone and their cliches. It's a horrible nightmare fusion of socmed influencer and LinkedIn hustler that sounds freakish even if it were human, and the density of tropes that are accumulating feels ridiculous.

Didn't the foundries take action against those in the past? I don't see "delve" nearly as often anymore. Why are the models spiraling like this now?

What really grinds my gears is the constant need to guess what I'm doing and offer a million random follow-ups. I asked what the weather was like, I don't appreciate the 5 paragraphs of tokens burned on weather-appropriate activity suggestions.

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