alt Hacker NewsFind it interesting that the section about LLM’s tells when using it for writing is absolutely littered with emdashes
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You can stop LLMs from using em-dashes by just telling it to "never use em-dashes". This same type of prompt engineering works to mitigate almost every sign of AI-generated writing, which is one reason why AI writing heuristics/detectors can never be fully reliable.
There was a comment recently by HN's most enthusiastic LLM cheerleader, Simon Willison, that I stopped reading almost immediately (before seeing who posted it), because it exuded the slop stench of an LLM: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46011877
However, I was surprised to see that when someone (not me) accused him of using an LLM to write his comment, he flatly denied it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46011964
Which I guess means (assuming he isn't lying) if you spend too much time interacting with LLMs, you eventually resemble one.
To be fair, LLMs usually use em-dashes correctly, whereas I think this document misuses them more often than not. For example:
> This can be extraordinarily powerful for summarizing documents — or of answering more specific questions of a large document like a datasheet or specification.
That dash shouldn't be there. That's not a parenthetical clause, that's an element in a list separated by "or." You can just remove the dash and the sentence becomes more correct.