“this is DEFINITELY written by AI, I can tell because it uses the writing quirks that AI uses (because it was trained on real people who write with those quirks)”
c'mon dudes we have got to do better than this
I am big AI naysayer but I think making it into the latest of a series of unprovable accusations that you can use to harass anyone who annoys you slightly for any reason is literally the worst way to push back against its encroachment into our spaces
#the only AI quirk I believe is the use of the em dash (—)#just because it’s a pain to properly type out and real people really don’t use it that often
hey so. not meaning to pick on you for this, but:
- there are various types of word processors or other text inputs which will automatically convert – to —, meaning its difficulty in being typed out is irrelevant
- there are a lot of people on tumblr, including in the notes of this thread, who have actively said that they use the emdash in their writing
- the whole point of LLMs is that they train on real people’s writing; they are not just randomly picking characters from the US-ASCII charset to include; AI would not generate text with emdashes if its training base did not also include writings by real people that used them
- this is exactly the sort of thing I’m saying is a problem. people saying that they think they can tell that something is an “AI quirk” because “real people” don’t use it, because their personal experience does not encompass its usage
When I last went looking for a new-to-me laptop, I looked specifically for one with a number pad, because I sorely missed typing the accented e in, for example, Pokémon. And then @alexseanchai got me using a proper em-dash instead of a double hyphen or a hyphen-between-spaces, and it’s a bit of a pain, but it’s still not that difficult to do? Just keep Num Lock on, hold down Alt, and press 0151 on the number pad.
(I do miss using ¦ and ¬ for emoticons as well, but at least I still have ° for degrees!)
That em dash accusation argument that claims em dash is proof of AI is like claiming that everyone writing Omegaverse is A. I. because of that one time an LLM scraped Ao3 and started putting Omegaverse references into all sorts of random stuff.
@thebibliosphere literally rations my em dashes. :|
i keep an em dash pinned in my copy and paste history on my laptop so i can use it when typing on places that don’t automatically correct – to —