Find it interesting that the section about LLM’s tells when using it for writing is absolutely littered with emdashes

To be fair, LLMs usually use em-dashes correctly, whereas I think this document misuses them more often than not. For example:

> This can be extraordinarily powerful for summarizing documents — or of answering more specific questions of a large document like a datasheet or specification.

That dash shouldn't be there. That's not a parenthetical clause, that's an element in a list separated by "or." You can just remove the dash and the sentence becomes more correct.

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NobodyNada 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

LLMs also generally don't put spaces around em dashes — but a lot of human writers do.

	▲	kimixa 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I think you're thinking of british-style "en-dashes" – which is often used for something that could have been separated by brackets but do have a space either side – rather than "em" dashes. They can also be used in a similar place as a colon – that is to separate two parts of a single sentence. British users regularly use that sort of construct with "-" hyphens, simply because they're pretty much the same and a whole lot easier to type on a keyboard.

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the_af 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I don't know whether that use of the em-dash is grammatically correct, but I've seen enough native English writers use it like that. One example is Philip K Dick.

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minimaxir 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You can stop LLMs from using em-dashes by just telling it to "never use em-dashes". This same type of prompt engineering works to mitigate almost every sign of AI-generated writing, which is one reason why AI writing heuristics/detectors can never be fully reliable.

	▲	dcre 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This does not work on Bryan, however.

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matt_daemon 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I believe Bryan is a well known em dash addict

	▲	rl3 7 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		>I believe Bryan is a well known em dash addict I was hoping he'd make the leaderboard, but perhaps the addiction took proper hold in more recent years: https://www.gally.net/miscellaneous/hn-em-dash-user-leaderbo... https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bcantrill No doubt his em dashes are legit, of course.
	▲	bryancoxwell 8 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		And I mean no disrespect to him for it, it’s just kind of funny

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anonnon 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There was a comment recently by HN's most enthusiastic LLM cheerleader, Simon Willison, that I stopped reading almost immediately (before seeing who posted it), because it exuded the slop stench of an LLM: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46011877

However, I was surprised to see that when someone (not me) accused him of using an LLM to write his comment, he flatly denied it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46011964

Which I guess means (assuming he isn't lying) if you spend too much time interacting with LLMs, you eventually resemble one.

	▲	Jweb_Guru 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> if you spend too much time interacting with LLMs, you eventually resemble one Pretty much. I think people who care about reducing their children's exposure to screen time should probably take care to do the same for themselves wrt LLMs.