> Chatgpt uses mdashes in basically every answer, while on average humans don't
I would not be shocked if an aspect to training is bucketing "this is an example of good writing style" into a specific category. Published books - far more likely to have had an editor sprinkle in fancy stuff - may be weightier for some aspects.
My iPhone converts -- to — automatically. So does Google Docs / Gmail (althought I'm not certain if that's on their end or my Mac's auto-correct kicking in). Plenty of them out there.
> other AIs would show the same bias
Unless they've been trained not to use it, now that a bunch of non-technical people believe "emdash = AI, always".
En and em dashes are easily accessible on both my laptop's and phone's keyboard layouts and I like using them, just like putting the ö in coöperate. It's sad if this now makes me look like a robot and I have to use the wrong dashes to be more "human".
As a Swedish native it really breaks my reading of an English word, but apparently it's supposed to indicate that you should pronounce each "o" separately. Language is fun.
As a native English speaker, it also breaks my reading of "cooperate". Never seen it before. I think parent is just annoyingly eccentric for the sake of it.
I admit that latter part is just for whimsy, because I think it looks fun. The dashes I like for their aesthetics and if that makes me eccentric then so be it. They shouldn't distract anyone's reading, or at least they didn't use to before LLMs.
It's just confusing for us poor Swedes since "ö" in Swedish is a separate letter with its own pronunciation, and not a somehow-modified "o". Always takes an extra couple of seconds to remember how "Motörhead" is supposed to be said. :)
If you’re using the dash on your keyboard (which is a “hyphen–minus” character) in place of a en dash or em dash, then you are using the wrong character. That’s fine — it’s certainly more convenient, and I wouldn’t call you out on it — but it’s silly to assume that other people don’t use the correct characters.
- Chatgpt uses mdashes in basically every answer, while on average humans don't (the average user might not even be aware it exists)
- if the preference for em dashes came from the training set, other AIs would show the same bias (gemini and Le chat don't seem to use them at all)