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!
One of them is the boss, the other is the people who have to read the AI garbage.
Just use AI to read the garbage!!
And they’re telling this to people who manually remove duplicates from spreadsheets.
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t lol
I used ai to help me write some reports lately and after the third time I started identifying specific words it uses all the time that normal report wouldn’t have. I don’t know about other uses but it my area of work we can tell when ai wrote a text because of the specific worda
Which words?
I’m more of a semicolon enjoyer myself.
I load my commas into a 10 gauge shotgun and fire them at the page.
Try the interrobang‽
They serve different functions; they need not compete for your love.
Me; too.
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.
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.
yeah, i guess it did, sorry eheheh
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.
Same thing goes for triple dot as a single character.
That’s a Mac thing (it isn’t but the Mac condensed … to one character).
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 couldn’t care less about the dash thing, but I will always upvote an Office Space meme.
I got started using — because the golems in Guild Wars 2 speak in all caps and with em dashes between the words.
I had to copy-paste after doing Alt+0151 somewhere else when doing the joke when using a golem transformation tonic and SPEAKING—LIKE—THIS since Guild Wars 2 does not respond to numpad input, but Mac users have it easy, they can just press Option+Shift+dash.On Windows, you would need a tool like PowerToys’ keyboard manager or a keyboard macro for that.
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.
Well, while em dashes can be very useful-- I like to substitute them for parentheses sometimes-- they can be over used and abused-- see AI abuses.
I didn’t even know what an em dash was until all this stuff about a.i. using them came up. I’ve certainly encountered them, but didn’t know the name. I’ve been using hyphens all this time for much the same purpose, but now I’m going to start using em dashes instead.
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.
So… Why don’t I see double spaces after your periods? Test. For. Double. Spaces.
EDIT: Yep, double spaces were removed from my test. So, that’s why. Although, they are still there as I’m editing this. So, not removed, just hidden, I guess?
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.
Web browsers collapse whitespace by default which means that sans any trickery or deliberately using nonbreaking spaces, any amount of spaces between words to be reduced into one. Since apparently every single thing in the modern world is displayed via some kind of encapsulated little browser engine nowadays, the majority of double spaces left in the universe that are not already firmly nailed down into print now appear as singles. And thus the convention is almost totally lost.
Markdown usually collapses double spaces, yeah. But you can force the double spaces. Like this.
Double spaces after periods can create “rivers.” This makes text more difficult to read for those with dyslexia. Whatever is used as a text editor is probably stripping them out for accessibility reasons. I suppose double spaces made sense with monospaced fonts.
https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/paper-format/accessibility/typography#myth4
HTML rendering collapses whitespace; it has nothing to do with accessibility. I would like to see the research on double-spacing causing rivers, because I’ve only ever noticed them in justified text where I would expect the renderer to be inserting extra space after a full stop compared between words within sentence anyway.
I’ve seen a lot of dubious legibility claims when it comes to typography including:
- serif is more legible
- sans-serif is more legible
- comic sans is more legible for people with dyslexia
and so on.
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.
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.
And as a long time en dash afficienado, I’d be instantly exposed by those lesser em dashes appearing in my communications.
ChatGPT is a no talent assclown
