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358 points tkgally | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.212s | source

The use of the em dash (—) now raises suspicions that a text might have been AI-generated. Inspired by a suggestion from dang [1], I created a leaderboard of HN users according to how many of their posts before November 30, 2022—that is, before the release of ChatGPT—contained em dashes. Dang himself comes in number 2—by a very slim margin.

Credit to Claude Code for showing me how to search the HN database through Google BigQuery and for writing the HTML for the leaderboard.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45053933

1. thinkingemote ◴[] No.45075665[source]
I mourn and celebrate the emdash as a sign and signal. I mourn our memories of it and laugh at myself in the future thinking about this when I have forgotten about it.

It's like the memory of the jokes about the wacky phrases of gpt2 or the ew at the yellow hue saturated ai generated images.

In the future this sign will be gone and our pattern recognition will adapt and our memory of this will also mostly be gone. Hello to future tech archeologists. The emdash isn't a meme, it will never survive and replicate but it's fun while it's lasting and I'm enjoying it in the meantime!

I mourn also because in the future we may have few or no obvious signs of LLM use. These are the golden years.