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by buu700 292 days ago
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.

1 comments

> 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.

It's a standard punctuation mark available on Android/iOS/macOS keyboards, and automatically inserted into text by widely used software such as Microsoft Word. You guys are acting like it's an obscure Unicode character that GPT just spontaneously started using out of the blue, and ignoring the obvious answer that it's common in LLM output because it's common in training data. The burden of proof is on anyone claiming that it isn't common.

I was referring to social media spam. It would be a simple way to defuse people citing the use of dashes as "proof" that your spam was spam and having the hivemind bury it. You can't ensnare gullible readers if they never see your comment to begin with — not that following an absurd blanket rule of categorizing em dash usage as AI output has anything to do with whether or not the reader is gullible.