[neuralkoi]

My ChatGPT meter tells me that it *feels* like this was written by AI:

Notice the excessive use of the em dash throughout the article combined with the sycophantic contrasts ChatGPT loves to use so much:

"It wasn’t intimacy. It wasn’t mutuality. It was access to simulation — clean, fast and frictionless."

A sad state of affairs if the NYT is letting AI-slop through.

[inkywatcher]

The dashes thing is really only a tell for high schoolers and obvious illiterates –writers can and do use them. Next we need to teach GPT about interrobangs.

[voskresenie]

thank you for saying this. I'm not a writer, just vaguely literate, and I find em-dashes to be extremely useful as a way of approximating conversational speech without a string of comma splices.

Additionally, the observation about AI using dashes really only applies (if it applies at all) to informal text conversation, not published articles. Here's a random NYT article from 2014 that uses 4 em-dashes within the first 3 paragraphs. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/fashion/the-year-of-taylo...

It seems like everyone watched some video essay about how em-dashes are a sure sign of AI, and they're just parroting it without question. The thing that apparently goes over people's heads is that the reason AI tends to use a lot of em-dashes is because the text in their training data uses a lot of em-dashes, and the training data is largely published articles and books, so it's a terrible heuristic for whether a published article or book was written using AI.

The thing that actually is somewhat more telling is that many people will use hyphens instead of dashes, eg on a computer, I typically type '--' instead of an em-dash, partly because my xcompose setup is inconsistent, partly because I write most of my text in editors that use monospaced fonts and the distinction between -, – , and — is extremely subtle in most fixed-width fonts, for obvious reasons. But on macs and many phones, as well as in google docs and similar, by default a hyphen will be autocorrected to an en- or em-dash depending on context, so it's not really a tell that the entire thing was written with AI, just that there was possibly non-human involvement. But also, a lot of people actually just know how to type and use dashes. It's not really that hard.

[voskresenie]

Let me guess—you watched a tiktok video telling you that em-dashes are a sure sign of AI, and you accepted it without question. Go find a couple NYT articles from 10 years ago and check how many em-dashes they use—the answer might surprise you! (Hint: AI uses a lot of em-dashes because its training data uses a lot of em-dashes. What is its training data?)

[carabiner]

I actually totally agree and was going to post this until I saw your comment. The writing is strikingly ChatGPT style. So many commas, weird phrase lists (especially with 3 items):

> No shrinking. No waiting. No apologizing.

> slowness, curiosity, accountability

> Avoidance. Exhaustion. Disrepair.

> It wasn’t intimacy. It wasn’t mutuality. It was access to simulation.

[liquidki]

To be sure, this is also taught in writing workshops, speaking workshops, comedy and improv as well, the rule of three:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_three_(writing)

[carabiner]

Yes and chatgpt is incredibly heavy handed with it. This is not how most NYT articles are written.

[ashwinsundar]

Your ChatGPT meter is probably broken

[audunw]

Yeah cause it’s completely unimaginable that a professional writer would use em dash /s

https://www.nightwater.email/em-dash-ai/

I do dread the wave of AI slop coming our way. But honestly what I dread even more is the comments that’s going to second guess every other article and comment, just because they use some character or style that people have decided is a sign of being AI generated. That’s gonna get tedious real fast.

[voskresenie]

I'm an amateur composer and it pains me to know that, given my lack of credentials, my work will always be viewed with the suspicion of AI involvement. I version control my scores for this reason, at the very least I can prove that it took me weeks, months, or sometimes years of effort and revisions to compose something, even if I can't prove that each revision wasn't just the output of an AI. It was already bad enough worrying that a melody or sequence I wrote is too similar to some other existing work and judged to be plagiarism, but that pales in comparison to AI suspicions.