I've had to deliberately strip em-dashes from my writing, even though sometimes they're genuinely the right punctuation for expressing a complex thought. The reason? I use AI to polish my professional writing (including this one), and em-dashes are the first thing I remove during review because leaving them in makes it look like I just hit "send" on an AI response without reading it.

The irony is that in tech, almost everyone is using AI to improve their writing at this point. And often it does make things clearer and more concise. But we've created this weird social norm where the output needs to look like it wasn't touched by AI, even when everyone knows it was. So we all spend time manually roughing up perfectly good text to maintain the illusion of authenticity.

Why? What's the incentive/value to commenting here with AI?

I wonder if some people here considered me ai at some point

damnit, I just happen to like the look of the thing. now everyone thinks I'm AI for pausing in my thoughts as I write—as if I were human...

Our life has become so dumb in certain ways. There are people who invested heavily in learning their mother or a foreign language, its spelling, grammar, syntax and idiosyncrasies, like when to use an em-dash, an Oxford comma, a semicolon, an ellipsis -- these smart educated people now seriously deliberate whether using wrong dashes and adding a spelling mistake or two would be a good way to prove you are a human (I think we never should have allowed the framing of CAPTCHA to be "prove you are not a robot", it was demeaning back then and still is now, it's just that the alternatives were not and still aren't clear-cut). The same things that would have made you fail a written essay in school are somehow becoming a requirement, but not in "haX0r" or online communities where "writing funny" has always been a differentiating factor, but for absolutely everybody who has to communicate with others in written form.

It's of course not a surprise that an LLM would be most proficient in language use and, adjacent to that, in proper formatting of said language. But it's a good thing and a good tool for writing, as anyone who has ever used a classic spell or grammar checker will attest to. But apparently we as a society have once again managed to completely overlook and demonise the good and now people who have paid attention in school have to bow to people who are somehow convinced that perfect spelling is a sign that someone cheated. This is not LLMs' fault, it's people's who think they've understood something when they really haven't, crying heresy over others doing things the correct way.

That being said: of course there are social and technological challenges with cheating, spam bots and sock puppets and what not, but the phenomenon itself is not really new, just the scale, cost and quality is way different now. We need to find a balanced way to approach it -- trying to weed out every last possible AI cheater while hurting real innocent people in the process is not worth it. Especially since we don't have a proper metric to actually prove who's a cheater and who is not, it's gotten way harder since the days of "As a large language model" being in every second sentence.

TBH, I learned about how to use em dashes from the AI controversy and now I find them really useful.

I just hope my writing carries enough voice and perspective that people respond, even if there's an em dash or two.

As an AI language model, I am not able to perform dashes.

It has been obvious since ChatGPT that the internet, including HN, will be flooded with AI generated commentary, drowning out real peoples' voices (soon undetectable). How this is surprising to anyone is a mystery.

This is like how I noticed the increase in thoughtbros on LinkedIn posting longform writing since the advent of LLMs..

Good thing I prefer en-dashes :)