I guess I’m confused. Why is it interesting to know how many em dashes were used before the dawn of ChatGPT? It’s how many AFTER that seems like it would be far more interesting.

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tkgally 7 days ago | parent | next [-]

As mentioned in the thread that included dang’s suggestion [1], examples of one’s use of em dashes timestamped before ChatGPT could be used as a defense if one is accused, on the basis of em dashes, of having written with AI.

Whether this is interesting or not, well…

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45046883

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latexr 7 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Because it’s becoming a common belief that any em-dash indicates LLM writing, and us people who regularly use em-dashes are attempting to show that is a poor signal on its own. The goal is to show proof of humans using it.

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Tostino 7 days ago | parent [-]

Or at least to have a baseline. If you see a sudden jump, that does tell you something.

	▲	bee_rider 7 days ago \| parent [-]
		Maybe it tells us that, thanks to AI, some folks learned about a perfectly useful piece of punctuation.

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southwindcg 7 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Some people accuse anyone who uses em dashes of using ChatGPT to write their posts. This is "proof" that actual humans use em dashes.

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vntok 6 days ago | parent [-]

Things like books are proof that actual humans use em dashes, that wasn't ever the contention.

What's needed is a writing comparison before/after 2022 for these users. If there's a sudden 200% increase in the use of em-dashes from one month to the next, it's a very strong indicator that the user started LLMing their posts.

	▲	southwindcg 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		Perhaps I should have qualified that humans use them in casual writing, website comments and the like, and not just in formal, published works that probably had an editor.

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dragonwriter 7 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Given that GPT-3.5 (like many LLMs) was trained with a large corpus of scraped internet data, including popular discussion fora, the people on the leaderboard are the ones potentially to blame for ChatGPT’s em-dash habit.