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The Programmer Identity Crisis

(hojberg.xyz)
270 points imasl42 | 3 comments | 21 Oct 25 16:47 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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protontypes ◴[21 Oct 25 17:08 UTC] No.45658345[source]▶
Whenever I see an em dash (—), I suspect the entire text was written by an AI.
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defgeneric ◴[21 Oct 25 17:29 UTC] No.45658701[source]▶
I'm seeing this reaction a lot from younger people (say, roughly under 25). And it's a shame this new suspicion has now translated into a prohibition on the use of dashes.
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1. almosthere ◴[21 Oct 25 17:35 UTC] No.45658796[source]▶
It's comical too because the only reason AI uses emdashes is because it was so common before AI.
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2. kazinator ◴[21 Oct 25 17:52 UTC] No.45659096[source]▶
It's utterly uncommon in the kind of casual writing for which people are using AI, that's why it got noticed. Social media posts, blogs, ...

AI almost certainly picked it up mainly from typeset documents, like PDF papers.

It's also possible that some models have a tokenizing rule for recognizing faked-out em-dashes made of hyphens and turning them into real em-dash tokens.

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3. svat ◴[21 Oct 25 22:42 UTC] No.45662663[source]▶
Not uncommon even on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45071722

On my own (long abandoned) blog, about 20% of (public) posts seem to contain an em dash: https://shreevatsa.wordpress.com/?s=%E2%80%94 (going by 4 pages of search results for the em dash vs 21 pages in total).