[lmm]

> Is it really a valuable life skill to decide whether or not you want to read something based solely on its density of em dashes?

Having good heuristics to make quick judgements is a valuable life skill. If you don't, you're going to get swamped.

> Would any of that somehow be more worth reading if the author posted a video of themselves carefully typing it up by hand?

No, but the volume of carefully hand-typed junk is more manageable. Compare with spam: Individually written marketing emails might be just as worthless as machine-generated mass mailings, but the latter is what's going to fill up your inbox if you can't filter it out.

> If LLM output were never worth reading, ChatGPT would have no users.

Only if all potential users were wise. Plenty of people waste their time and money in all sorts of ways.

[buu700]

Having good heuristics is a valuable life skill. Presence of standard punctuation is not a good heuristic.

[lmm]

If it's stupid and it works, it's not stupid.

[SAI_Peregrinus]

If it's stupid and it works once, chances are it's stupid and you just got lucky.

[the_af]

What if it's stupid, and it mostly works except in some corner cases and until the current paradigm changes yet again?

[SAI_Peregrinus]

Then it's stupid and you're going to have an inevitable failure. Hopefully without any expensive sounds, so don't put LLMs in charge of heavy machinery or medical devices.

[the_af]

I think you misunderstood.

What we're discussing is whether a set of heuristics to determine whether something is the output of a human or an LLM are "stupid", not whether we should put LLMs in charge of critical work. It's not the LLMs we're talking about, but the heuristics to detect them.

The person you initially replied to claimed the heuristics (to detect LLMs) are not stupid if they are shown to work (by detecting LLMs). The person they were replying to claimed such heuristics were useless.

[the_af]

This seems like begging the question to me.

Why do you think it's not a good heuristic to be able to quickly spot the tell-tale signs of LLM involvement, before you've wasted time reading slop?

Yes, there will be false positives. It's a heuristic after all.

[buu700]

Because the false positive rate is unacceptably high — we're talking about a standard, widely used character — and because if the heuristic becomes widespread enough to matter, then it will be trivially circumvented by bad actors anyway. Who is it helping if we collectively bully ourselves into excising a perfectly good punctuation mark from human language?

If anything, I'd rather that renderers like Markdown just all agree to change " - " to an en dash and " -- " to an em dash. Then we could put the matter to bed once and for all.

[the_af]

Oh no, I'm not advocating ditching em-dahses. I love them -- the form I use, anyway.

I was just curious why you've decided paying attention to them is a bad heuristic. Sure, it can change once people instruct their LLMs not to use them, but still, for now, they sure seem to overuse them!

That and "let's unpack this". I swear, I'll forbid ChatGPT from using "unpack" ever again, in any context!

[buu700]

That's fair. It's not like I don't pay attention to it myself. It's more that I wouldn't never use presence of em dashes in the absence of any other heuristics to predict whether or not something is LLM-generated, and it's a practically useless signal either way because I also wouldn't assume that content that used hyphens in place of dashes wasn't LLM-generated.

So the only real purpose of the heuristic is to add a tiny extra vote of confidence when I see a comment that otherwise appears to be lazy ChatGPT copypasta, but in such cases I'll predict that it was probably LLM output either way, and I'll judge that it appears to be poor writing that isn't worth my time regardless of whether or not an LLM was involved.

Fundamentally, the issue I'm seeing here is that we're all talking over each other because we need a better standardized term than "LLM output". I suppose "slop" could work if we universally that it referred only to a subset of LLM output, rather than being synonymous with LLM output in general, but I'm not sure that we do universally agree on that.

If someone types the equivalent of a Google search into ChatGPT, or a spammer has an automated process generically reply to social media posts/comments, that's what qualifies to me as "slop". Most of us here have seen it in the wild by now, and there's obviously a distinctive common style (at least for now), and I think we can all agree that it sucks. That's very different from someone investing time and/or expertise to produce content that just happens to involve an LLM as one of the tools in their arsenal; the attitude it isn't is just the modern equivalent of considering cellular phone calls or typed letters to be "impersonal".

I'm not suggesting that LLM output doesn't tend to have a higher density of em dashes than human output. I'm just pushing back on the idea that presence of em dashes is sufficient evidence to dismiss something as probably-LLM-generated, which is no better than superstition. I mean, I've used em dashes in a number of comments in this thread, and no one has accused me of using an LLM, so it can't be a pattern that anyone puts too much stock in.

[lmm]

> the false positive rate is unacceptably high — we're talking about a standard, widely used character

Citation needed.

> Who is it helping if we collectively bully ourselves into excising a perfectly good punctuation mark from human language?

Humans can adapt faster than LLM companies, at least for the moment. We need to be willing to play to our strengths.

Who is it helping if we bully ourselves into ignoring a simple, easy "tell"?

[buu700]

Citation needed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash

Humans can adapt faster than LLM companies

No one said anything about LLM companies. If I were a spammer today, I'd just have my code replace dashes in LLM output with hyphens before posting it. As a human, I'm not going to suddenly stop using dashes because a handful of people are treating a silly meme as if it were a genuinely useful heuristic.

[lmm]

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash

That maybe backs up the claim that it's standard, but not that it's widely used or the false positive rate would be unacceptably high.

> If I were a spammer today, I'd just have my code replace dashes in LLM output with hyphens before posting it.

No you wouldn't, for the same reason spammers don't put more plausible stories in their emails: they want to filter for the most gullible segment before investing any human effort.

[rsynnott]

Honestly it is currently _good enough_. It's obviously imperfect, like ~all heuristics, but its false positive rate should be fairly low.

[buu700]

"Should be fairly low" isn't a safe assumption without robust data to back that up. I think it's more likely to be unacceptably high. Dashes are standard punctuation marks available through Android/iOS/macOS keyboards, and automatically inserted into text by common tools like Microsoft Word — not some obscure Unicode character. What's next, are we going to start flagging any text that ends in a question mark as "AI-generated"?