I'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.
"That's such a great observation that highlights an important social issue — let's delve into it!"
I've been prompting the bot to avoid its tics for as long as I've been using it for anything; 3 years or so, now, I'd guess.
It's just a matter of reading and understanding the output, noticing patterns that are repetitious or annoying, and instructing the bot as such: "No. Fucking stop that."
The trouble is "AI" is waaaaay less of a boost to productivity if you have to actually check the output closely. My wife does a lot with AI-assisted writing and keeps running into companies that think it's going to let them fire a shitload of writers and have the editors do everything... but editing AI slop is way more work than editing the output of a half-decent human writer, let alone a good one.
If you're getting a lot of value out of LLM writing right now, your quality was already garbage and you're just using it to increase volume, or you have let your quality crater.
Biggest one in this case, in my opinion: it's an extremely long article with awkward section headers every few paragraphs. I find that any use of "The ___ Problem" or "The ___ Lesson" for a section header is especially glaring. Or more generally, many superfluous section headers of the form "The [oddly-constructed noun phrase]". I mean, googling "The Fire-Retardant Giants" literally only returns this specific article.
Or another one here: the historic stock price data is slightly wrong. For whatever reason, LLMs seem to make mistakes with that often, perhaps due to operating on downsampled data. The initial red-flag here is the first table claims Apple's split-adjusted peak close in 2000 was exactly $1.00.
There are plenty of issues with the accuracy of the written content as well, but it's not worth getting into.
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?
Oh, no thanks. The emdash is lazy writing, through and through, for the same reason a parenthetical expressed any other way might be. LLMs overuse them the same way humans do: to pack in context where it doesn't belong. I'd happily lay the emdash and all its terrible cousins upon the sacrificial altar to see a renaissance in editing and proper sentence construction.
Fair enough. I fully recognize just how easily it gets abused, and "used with purpose" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in my original comment. That said, if someone's going to engage in sentence sprawl, I'd much rather an em dash get abused in the process than some of the alternatives. Bad em dashes are at least less ambiguous than a chain of a commas mashing meaning into mush, and they provide an obvious visual break that jumps out at the reader.
Em dashes are strong; they can take the abuse. While I'm right there with you on dreaming of a renaissance in quality writing, that's likely more fantastical than my own hopes that we'd see a resurgence in quality em dash usage. At this point, I'd probably settle for outright stagnation in writing ability.
I’ve never seen an LLM use an em-dash the way a thoughtful human is most likely to use them, in a parentheses-like pair. It’s just too bad there’s way too many idiots who cannot notice such subtleties.
I first learned about em dash reading the GNU Texinfo manual in the 1990s. Now I have to wear a red, slightly long horizontal line on my shirt, and passersby shun me.
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.
Edit: I forgot HN strips emojis.