alt Hacker NewsI'm excited for the AI wildfire to come and engulf these AI-written thinkpieces. At this point I'd prefer a set of bullet points over having to sift through more "it's not X (emdash) it's Y" pestilence.
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> "it's not X (emdash) it's Y" pestilence.
I wonder for how long this will keep working. Can't be too hard to prompt an AI to avoid "tells" like this one...
> it's not X (emdash) it's Y
No, no, no! Stop that! The em dash is an wonderful little punctuation mark that's damned useful when used with purpose. You can't turn it into some scarlet glyph just because normal people finally noticed they exist. LLMs use them because we used them, damn it.
For god's sake, are we supposed to go back to the dark ages of the double hyphen like typographic barbarians in the hopes that a future update won't ruin that, too? After all the work to get text editors to automatically substitute them in the first place?
What's funny is that, when people first started noticing that LLMs tended to like the em dash, I'd mentioned to a friend that I hoped—rather naively—it might lead to a resurgence and people would think to themselves "huh, that looks pretty useful." Needless to say, I got that one wrong. Are we really going to sacrifice the poor em dash just because people can't come up with a better signifier for LLM text?
You forgot the italics on Y
I’m just glad everyone stopped posting their perfect prompting strategies.
Even if bubble burst will be massive, the slop factories will not stop with using it, because it's one of the use cases LLMs are just good at
It makes me wonder what verbal tics / tells it has in other languages.
Of course, that's exactly what won't happen. AI as "better spam" is not going away, it's going to wriggle in everywhere.
It's more things like AI delivering pizza that's under threat. You know, the actual value.
I think there is a high risk that people will begin writing like AI, or they will stop using effective/engaging styles because AI happens to use those. I don't want to deal with people writing in contrived/awkward/imperfect ways just to appear more human. That is a losing game anyway, because AI will learn to copy everyone.
I just copy-paste an article into chatgpt and tell it to give me 3 bullet points for the article. We should have had this forever.
You’re absolutely right! It’s not just pestilence—It’s the death of the internet as we know it. …I’m sorry, I couldn’t help myself.
Edit: I forgot HN strips emojis.