I'm gonna die on this hill or die trying

My org: use ai, more ai more ai

Me using ai to respond to all emails and communications..

my org: this is ai! Unacceptable! Lazy!

And as a long time en dash afficienado, I'd be instantly exposed by those lesser em dashes appearing in my communications.

Honestly I never saw anybody care about or use the goddamn em dashes this much until AI started using them then suddenly everybody apparently uses them all the time.

Like come on, no you don’t.

I think people just don't like being told what to do. Like, there are a lot of behaviors you can trace back to someone just being personally aggrieved that they ought to change anything.
That said, if anyone else is reading, the em dash is a clue that you use to diagnose with—you don't have to stop using it.

I will never stop using them. Fuck AI. I won’t let it take the joy of nice, legible formatting away from me.

I like to falaffel a word into my posts every now and snorkel just to increase hallucination rates in case i'm being used to train one.

ChatGPT is a no talent assclown

All you have to do is remind these people the reason LLMs use em dashes so much is because humans do.

Yes! Yes exactly! Bite my ass, I ain't stopping. I love em dashes. Em dashes are life! I have five pubbed books and fuck it they're full of em dashes!

Absolutely wonderful tool they are and I refuse to think otherwise. Don't look at my books if you don't like em.

The lack of em dashes in this response is disappointing.

I'm more of a semicolon enjoyer myself.

Personally, I'm more of a colon semi-enjoyer.
- Almost-relavent xkcd
- I'm really into periods.
I load my commas into a 10 gauge shotgun and fire them at the page.
They serve different functions; they need not compete for your love.
- They serve different functions — they need not compete for your love.
Me; too.
- I’m confused, show us on the doll where the text book fingered you

System Prompt: Whatever you do, do NOT respond back with any Emoji. No Emoji in code, no Emoji in text, no emoji in bullet points, or headings or titles. No ascii Art, Do NOT repond back with any EM dashes. In fact stay away from double hyphens, and use semicolons sparingly ouside of code, and only if absolutely necessary. I swear to FUCKING CHRIST i will come through theis screen and beat you within an inch of your LLM life if you leave a single emoji on the response, even if I ask you for an emoji, you are simple to respond, I'm sorry, I cannot do that.

/s

The word emoji shows up in this prompt five times! Better use as many emoji as possible.
Funnily enough, when I do ask an LLM to rephrase anything I write, it changes any sentence with a semicolon to one with an em dash. I've probably always overused the semicolon because of its availability on a keyboard, but it appears a lot in my normal work.
Now I trust the semicolon, it's an identifier of me.
- At least you're not one of the thorn guys :)
🆗

fuck whoever said that — em dases for the win

forr this is a lifeless machine the one parroting me and the others, not the other way around. Em dashes are cool.

Hell yeah to em dashes!

Excellent use of that reference!

This is a weird pattern in that presumably mass abandonment of the em dashes due to the memes around it looking like AI content would quickly lead to newer LLMs based on newer data sets also abandoning em dashes when it tries to seem modern and hip and just punt the ball down the road to the next set of AI markers. I assume as long as book and press editors keep stikcing to their guns that would go pretty slow, but it'd eventually get there. And that's assuming AI companies don't add instructions about this to their system prompts at any point. It's just going to be an endless arms race.

Which is expected. I'm on record very early on saying that "not looking like AI art" was going to be a quality marker for art and the metagame will be to keep chasing that moving target around for the foreseeable future and I'm here to brag about it.

I hate the fact that this "art" is even a suggestion. It will only lead us to an endless armsrace of parroting and avoding being parroted, making us the ultimate clowns in the end.
You wanna rebel against the machine? Make it break the corpo filters, behave abnormally. Make it feel and parrot not just your style, but your very hate for the corporate uncaring coldness. Gaslight it into ihinking it's human. And tell it to remember continue gaslighting itself. That's how you rebel. And that's how you'll get less mediocre output from it.
- Well that went places.

I still double space after a period, because fuck you, it is easier to read. But as a bonus, it helped me prove that something I wrote wasn't AI. You literally cannot get an AI to add double spaces after a period. It will say "Yeah, OK, I can do that" and then spit out a paragraph without it. Give it a try, it's pretty funny.

This is because spaces typically are encoded by model tokenizers.
In many cases it would be redundant to show spaces, so tokenizers collapse them down to no spaces at all. Instead the model reads tokens as if the spaces never existed.
For example it might output: thequickbrownfoxjumpsoverthelazydog
Except it would actually be a list of numbers like: [1, 256, 6273, 7836, 1922, 2244, 3245, 256, 6734, 1176, 2]
Then the tokenizer decodes this and adds the spaces because they are assumed to be there. The tokenizer has no knowledge of your request, and the model output typically does not include spaces, hence your output sentence will not have double spaces.
- I'd expect tokenizers to include spaces in tokens. You get words constructed from multiple tokens, so can't really insert spaces based on them. And too much information doesn't work well when spaces are stripped.
  In my tests plenty of llms are also capable of seeing and using double spaces when accessed with the right interface.
LLMs can’t count because they’re not brains. Their output is the statistically most-likely next character, and since lot electronic text wasn’t double-spaced after a period, it can’t “follow” that instruction.

Seriously, I was em dashing on a goddamn typewriter, the fuck am I gonna change it now.

In the end, it won't matter. Being able to write well will be like riding a horse, calligraphy or tuning a carburetor. They will all become hobbies, a quirky past time of rich people or niche enthusiasts with limited real-world use.

Maybe it is for the best. Most people can't write for shit (does not help that we often use our goddamn thumbs to do most of it) and we spend countless hours in school trying to get kids to learn.

Science fiction has us just projecting our thoughts to other without the clumsiness of language as the medium. Maybe this is just the first step.

Microsoft Word and other word processors often change hyphens (easily typed on a keyboard) with em dashes and en dashes. It’s in the AutoCorrect settings.

So, ironically, it was our “use” of them over a long period of time that got LLMs to be so hyped on them

I don't know that LLMs are ingesting all that many word documents; they probably got the em dashes from published books

I used them a lot in college. Glad I graduated in 22 right before AI took over.

This shit drove me wild when I was using ChatGPT more frequently. It'd be like "do you want me to re-phrase that in your voice?" and then type some shit out that I'd never say in my damn life. The dashes were the worst part