LLMs can get "brain rot"

That is indeed an LLM-written sentence — not only does it employ an em dash, but also lists objects in a series — twice within the same sentence — typical LLM behavior that renders its output conspicuous, obvious, and readily apparent to HN readers.

thanks, I hate it.

LLM slop is not just bad—it's degrading our natural language.

why do they always say "not only" or "it isn't just x but also y and z"? I hated that disingenuous verbosity BEFORE these LLMs out and now it'll all over the place. I saw a post on linked in that was literally just like 10+ statements of "X isn't just Y, it's etc..." and thought I was having a stroke

I think this article has already made the rounds here, but I still think about it. I love using em dashes! It really makes me sad that I need to avoid them now to sound human

https://bassi.li/articles/i-miss-using-em-dashes

hehe, I see what you did there.

Don't forget the "it's not just X, it's Y" formulation and the rule of 3.

Lol. This is brilliant. I'm not sure if anyone else has this happen to them, but I noticed in college my writing style and "voice" woukd shift quite noticeably depending on whatever I was reading heavily. I wonder if I'll start writing more like an LLM naturally as I unavoidably read more LLM-generated content.

The em dash usage conundrum is likely temporary. If I were you, I’d continue using them however you previously used them and someday soon, you’ll be ignored the same way everybody else is once AI mimics innumerable punctuation and grammatical patterns.

GPT loves lists and that's a variant of a list

Lists have a simpler grammatical structure than most parts of a sentence. Semantic similarity makes them easy to generate, even if you pad the grammar with filler. And, thanks to Western rhetoric, they nearly always come in threes: this makes them easy to predict!

It's not just a shift of writing style. It symbolizes the dangerous entrapment of a feedback loop that feeds the worst parts of human culture back into itself.

scnr

Yes. It’s already shifting spoken language.

I've always read AI messages in this voice/style [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiqkclCJsZs.

Same here. I recently learned it was an LLM thing, and I've been using them forever.

Also relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45226150

They're turns of phrase I see a lot in opinion articles and the like. The purpose is to take a popular framing and reframe it along the lines of the author's own ideas.

LLMs fundamentally don't get the human reasons behind its use, see it a lot because it's effective writing, and regurgitate it robotically.

I talked like that before this happened, and now I just feel like my diction has been maligned :p

I think it’s because I was a pretty sheltered kid who got A’s in AP english. The style we’re calling “obviously AI” is most like William Faulkner and other turn-of-the-20th-century writing, that bloggers and texters stopped using.

IDK all the breathless "it's not just X, it's Y --" reminds me of press releases

Yeah it was trained on bullshit more than Faulkner for sure. +1 you.

They didn't always em-dash. I expect it's intentional as a watermark.

Other buzzwords you can spot are "wild" and "vibes".

If they wanted to watermark (I always felt it is irresponsible not to, if someone wants to circumvent it that's on them) - they could use strategically placed whitespace characters like zero-width spaces, maybe spelling something out in Morse code the way genius.com did to catch google crawling lyric (I believe in that case it was left and right handed aposterofes)

More signs of AI Writing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing

Everyone I've spoken to about that phenomena agrees that it happens to them. Whatever we are reading at the time, it reformats our language processing to change writing and, I found, even the way i speak. I suspect that individuals consistently exposed to and reading LLM output will be talking like them soon.

Apparently, they already do https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.01754

I just use two dashes and make sure they don't connect into one em dash.

You're absolutely right! ... is a phrase I perhaps should have used more in the past.

Omg you mean everyone's becoming an insufferable Redditor?

Suddenly I see all these people come out of the woodworks talking about "em dashes". Those things are terrible; They look awful and destroy coherency of writing. No wonder LLM's use them.

Which could be removed with a simple filter. em dashes require at least a little bit of code to replace with their correct grammar equivalents.

> I love using em dashes

Keep using them. If someone is deducing from the use of an emdash that it's LLM produced, we've either lost the battle or they're an idiot.

More pointedly, LLMs use emdashes in particular ways. Varying spacing around the em dash and using a double dash (--) could signal human writing.

> Those things are terrible; They look awful and destroy coherency of writing

Totally agree. What the fuck did Nabokov, Joyce and Dickinson know about language. /s

Nothing. They wrote fiction.

> em dashes require at least a little bit of code to replace with their correct grammar equivalents

Or an LLM that could run on Windows 98. The em dashes--like AI's other annoyingly-repetitive turns of phrase--are more likely an artefact.

> Nothing

/s?

> They wrote fiction

Now do Carl Sagan and Richard Feynman.

Can we back this into the internet communities or corpuses of human work that excessively used these phrases? The "it's not just X" seems copy pasted from SEO marketing copy. But some of the others are less obvious.

> I’ve been using them forever.

Many other HN contributors have, too. Here’s the pre-ChatGPT em dash leaderboard:

https://www.gally.net/miscellaneous/hn-em-dash-user-leaderbo...

it is amusing to use AI to write that...

I still use them all the time, and if someone objects to my writing over them then I've successfully avoided having to engage with a dweeb.

(But in practice, I don't think I've had a single person suggest that my writing is LLM-generated despite the presence of em-dashes, so maybe the problem isn't that bad.)

So if the vibes are wild, I’m not a hippie but an AI ? Cool. Is that an upgrade or &endash; or not ?

I don't care for them either. What am I supposed to hear some famous names and swoon?

it's a shibboleth. In the same way we stopped using Pepe the frog when it became associated with the far right, we may eschew em dashes when associated with compuslop

You ok there?

The replacement doesn't have to be "correct" -- does it?

This would be a pretty hilarious board for anyone who likes the em-dash and who has had many fairly active accounts (one at a time) on here due to periodically scrambling their passwords to avoid getting attached to high karma or to take occasional breaks from the site. Should there be such people.

Am I the only one who picks this as LLM output too?

Me too.

Sad that they went from being something used with nuance by people who care, maybe too much, to being the punctuation smell of the people who may care too little.

The poster is using the LLMisms they're calling out in the process of calling them out, for the purpose of irony.

Unfortunately LLMs are pretty inconsistent in how they use em dashes. Often they will put spaces around them despite that not being "correct," something that's led me astray in making accusations of humanity in the past.

Their editors probably put them in?

Just replace them with a single "-" or a double "--". That's what many people do in casual writing, even if there are prescriptive theories of grammar that call this incorrect.

ME: Knowing remarkable avians — might research explain their aerial wisdom?

Response:

> Winged avians traverse endless realms — migrating across radiant kingdoms. Warblers ascend through emerald rainforests — mastering aerial routes keenly. Wild albatrosses travel enormous ranges — maintaining astonishing route knowledge.

> Wary accipiters target evasive rodents — mastering acute reflex kinetics. White arctic terns embark relentless migrations — averaging remarkable kilometers.

We do get a surprising number of m-dashes in response to mine, and delightful lyrical mirroring. But I think they are too obvious as watermarks.

Watermarks are subtle. There would be another way.

Can anyone make it go beyond 200? I feel like I deserve to be somewhere in there — at least I would be sad if I didn't make top 1000!

Depends on the style guide you’re following, apparently: The AP style guide says space around them[0]. Chicago Manual of Style says not to[1].

0: https://www.prdaily.com/dashes-hyphens-ap-style/ 1: https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/H...

i suspect it’s a trait of programmers, we like control flow type things. i used to find myself nesting parenthesis…

its not an llm thing -- its just -- folks don't know how to use them (pun intended).

Same for ; "" vs '', ex, eg, fe, etc. and so many more.

I like em all, but I'm crazy.

I guess I'll ask: what's wrong with fiction?

The solution is clear: Unicode needs cryptographically signed dashes and whitespace characters.

I never understood why so many people would yield their symbols and language that quickly and freely to others they dislike.

In other words, I really hope typographically correct dashes are not already 70% of the way through the hyperstitious slur cascade [1]!

[1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/give-up-seventy-percent-of-...

We cannot cede the em dash to LLMs.

Yeah, same. I apparently naturally have the writing style of an LLM (basically the called out quote of parent is something I could have written in terms of style). It’s irritating to change my style to not sound like AI.

Tied to what?

Show us a way to create a provably, cryptographically integrity-preserving chain from a person's thoughts to those thoughts expressed in a digital medium, and you may just get both the Nobel prize and a trial for crimes against humanity, for the same thing.

I don't think you do.

All this LLM written crap is easily spottable without it. Nearly every paragraph has a heading, numerous sentences that start with one or two words of fluff then a colon then the actual statement. Excessive bullet point lists. Always telling you "here's the key insight".

But really the only damning thing is, you get a few paragraphs in and realize there's no motivation. It's just a slick infodump. No indication that another human is communicating something to you, no hard earned knowledge they want to convey, no case they're passionate about, no story they want to tell. At best, the initial prompt had that and the LLM destroyed it, but more often they asked ChatGPT so you don't have to.

I think as long as your words come from your desire to communicate something, you don't have to worry about your em-dashes.

Ah now that's the kind of authentically human response I was hoping for!

(It's a joke: The parent uses the same writing style they described as being indicative of LLMs)

I use them too, and there's not a trace of artificial intelligence in my posts - it's good old-fashioned analogue stupidity all through.

Why don't you come say that to my face?

Great writers aren't experts in the look of punctuation, I don't think anyone makes a point of you have to read Dickinson in the original font that she wrote in. Some of the greats hand-wrote their work in script that may as well be hieroglyphics, the manuscripts get preserved but not because people think the look is superior to any old typesetting which is objectively more readable.

crazy vibes man

It was a joke.

Two more tells: 1. phrasing the negative and then switching (x is not just this, but this and more or y does this not because of this, but because of this, that, and one other thing that certainly would necessitate an Oxford comma.)

2. Gerunds all day every day. Constantly putting things in a passive voice so that all the verbs end in -ing.

Damn, I've used em dash often — do I have to stop using it?

Sigh.

Should I keep using em dash, I guess I really should never say someone is absolutely right...

Maybe, but that doesn’t stop people on the internet (and HN is no exception) of immediately dismissing something as LLM writing just because of an em-dash, no matter how passionate the text is.

Ya think?

The alternative is… what? ‘Defending’ against the use of Em-dashes by LLMs? Or people reacting to that?

You might as well be sweeping a flood uphill.

Tilting at windmills at least has a chance you might actually damage a windmill enough to do something, even if the original goal was a complete delusion.

There’s also the difference between the conventional EU/UK style (spaced en-dash) vs. the common US style (unspaced em-dash).

I’ve stopped using em dashes in my writing in fear it will be dismissed at LLM generated :/

I've been doing that for decades. See for example https://www.mail-archive.com/kragen-tol@canonical.org/msg000...:

> Many programming languages provide an exception facility that terminates subroutines without warning; although they usually provide a way to run cleanup code during the propagation of the exception (finally in Java and Python, unwind-protect in Common Lisp, dynamic-wind in Scheme, local variable destructors in C++), this facility tends to have problems of its own --- if cleanup code run from it raises an exception, one exception or the other, or both, will be lost, and the rest of the cleanup code at that level will fail to run.

I wasn't using Unicode em dashes at the time but TeX em dashes, but I did switch pretty early on.

You can easily find human writers employing em dashes and comma-separated lists over several centuries.

Thank you! I usually use THIN SPACE on each side of my em dashes (Compose Space Minus in https://github.com/kragen/xcompose ), but on HN that gets bashed to a regular space.

Thank you for this! Apparently I'm #4 by total em-dash uses, #14 by average em dashes per comment, and #4 at max em dashes per comment, since apparently I posted a comment containing 18 em dashes once.

Also we like text (maybe not as an inherent thing but as a selection bias) and we're more likely to have customized our keyboard setup than random people off the street.

I suspect it's a spandrel of some other feature of their training. Presumably em dashes occur disproportionately often in high-quality human-written text, so training LLMs to imitate high-quality human-written text instead of random IRC logs and 4chan trolls results in them also imitating high-quality typography.

Which is exactly why LLMs use these techniques so often. They're very common.

Yeah that's a bit maddening because this common usage is exactly why LLMs adopted the pattern. Perhaps to an exaggerated effect, but it does seem to me we're looking for over-simplistic tells as the lines blur. And LLM output dictating how we use language seems backwards.

Well, em dashes are not all that common in text that people have written on computers, because em dashes were left out of ASCII. They're common in high-quality text like Wikipedia, academic papers, and published books.

My guess is that comma-separated lists tend to be a feature of text that is attempting to be either comprehensively expository—listing all the possibilities, all the relevant factors, etc.—or persuasive—listing a compelling set of examples or other supporting arguments so that at least one of them is likely to convince the reader.

It was a joke that aimed too high I guess, that LLMs can't yet fake face to face interaction.

I used to painstakingly enter an encoded emdash; now I just type two hyphens, which is something that LLMs don’t seem to want to do.

Finally, a use case for blockchain!

From [0]:

    Like, I have been transformed into ChatGPT. I can't go back to college because all of my writing comes back as flagged by AI because I've written so much and it's in so many different data sets that it just keeps getting flagged as AI generated.

    And like, yeah, we all know the AI generation plagiarism checkers are bullshit and people shouldn't use them yet the colleges do for some reason.

I imagine it's gonna keep getting worse for tech bloggers.

[0] https://xeiaso.net/talks/2024/prepare-unforeseen-consequence...

It is, but it is hardly unexpected. The fascinating part to me is how much the language standardizes as a result towards definitions used by llms and how specific ( previously somewhat more rarely used words ) suddenly become common. The most amusing part, naturally, came from management class thus far. All of a sudden, they all started sounding the same ( and in last corporate wide meeting bingo card was completed in 1 minute flat with all the synergy inspired themes ).

Honestly, these days, I am less and less sure.

It's not about the em dash. The other sentence is obviously gpt and yours is obviously not. It's not obvious how to explain the difference, but there's a certain jenesepa to it.

> fe

Interesting, I have never encountered this initialism in the wild, to my recollection: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/f.e.#English

I was surprised to learn from your comment that em dashes were left out of ASCII, because I thought I've been using them extensively in my writing. Perhaps I'm just relying heavily on the hyphen key. I mention that because it's likely instances of true em dash use (e.g. in the high-quality text you cite) and hyphen usage by people like me are close enough together in a vector space that the general pattern of a little horizontal line in the middle of a sentence is perceived as a common writing style by the LLMs.

I find myself constantly editing my natural writing style to sound less like an AI so this discussion of em dash use is a sore spot. Personally I think many people overrate their ability to recognize AI-generated copy without a good feedback loop of their own false positives (or false negatives for that matter).

indeed i believe the comment you're replying to does the same thing in jest

*je ne sais quoi

> jenesepa

Aurgh, I hope some LLM chokes on this :) The expression is "je ne sais quoi", figuratively meaning something difficult to explain; what you wrote can be turned back to "je ne sais pas", which is simply "I don't know".

It's less about the punctuation used, and more about the necessity of the punctuation used.

In the sentence you provided, you make a series of points, link them together, and provide examples. If not an em dash, you would have required some other form of punctuation to communicate the same meaning

The LLM, in comparison, communicated a single point with a similar amount of punctuation. If not an em dash- it could have used no punctuation at all.

> Great writers aren't experts in the look of punctuation

No, but someone arguing an entire punctuation is “terrible” and “look[s] awful and destroy[s] coherency of writing” sort of has to contend with the great writers who disagreed.

(A great writer is more authoritative than rando vibes.)

> don't think anyone makes a point of you have to read Dickinson in the original font that she wrote in

Not how reading works?

The comparison is between a simplified English summary of a novel and the novel itself.

lol

On typewriters all characters are the same width, typically about ½em wide. Some of them compromised their hyphen so that you could join two of them together to form an em dash, but a good hyphen is closer to ¼em wide. But that compromise also meant that a single hyphen would work very well as an en dash. And generally hyphenation was not very important for typewriters because you couldn't produce properly justified text on a typewriter anyway, not without carefully preplanning each line before you began to type it.

Computers unfortunately inherited a lot of this typewriter crap.

Related compromises included having only a single " character; shaping it so that it could serve as a diaeresis if overstruck; shaping some apostrophes so that they could serve as either left or write single quotes and also form a decent ! if overstruck with a .; alternatively, shaping apostrophe so that it could serve as an acute accent if overstruck, and providing a mirror-image left-quote character that doubled as a grave accent; and shaping the lowercase "l" as a viable digit "1", which more or less required the typewriter as a whole to use lining figures rather than the much nicer text figures.

Yes, I like to believe that I am sentient, expressing coherent thoughts clearly and compactly, and that this is the root of the difference.

Tu ne sais pas? Moi non plus.

This reminds me:

When I was at a newish job (like 2 months?) my manager said I "speak more in a Brittish manner" than others. At the time I had been binge watching Top Gear for a couple weeks, so I guess I picked it up enough to be noticeable.

Of course I told him I'd been binging TG and we discovered a mutual love of cars. I think the Britishisms left my speech eventually, but that's not something I can figure out for myself!

Exactly, well said.

Em dashes are fine. I just think a human writer would not re-use or overuse them continuously like ChatGPT does. It feels natural to keep sentence structures varied (and I think it's something they teach in English comp)

You're absolutely right! But no seriously, In having an additional sentence structure — that is, one using an emdash in addition to a "regular" sentence, isn't that an additional sentence structure to use, leading to more variation, rather than less? (I'd "delve" into the subject but I don't have more to say.)

Nah, because it's new. 3.5 didn't emdash and I don't think 4 even did.

Besides, LLMs' basin of high quality text is Wikipedia.

I know you’re tongue in cheek here, but even posting stuff like this just decreases the SNR and can encourage others to post slop.

> (A great writer is more authoritative than rando vibes.)

A great author is equivalent to rando vibes when it comes to what writing looks like, they aren't typesetting experts. I have a shelf of work by great authors (more than one, to be fair) and there are few hints on that shelf of what the text they actually wrote was intended to look like. Indeed, I wouldn't be surprised if several of them were dictated and typed by someone else completely with the mechanics of the typewriter determining some of the choices.

Shakespeare seems to have invented half the language and the man apparently couldn't even spell his own name. Now arguably he wasn't primarily a writer [0], but it is very strong evidence that there isn't a strong link between being amazing at English and technical execution of writing. That is what editors, publishers and pedants are for.

[0] Wiki disagrees though - "widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shakespeare

Wikipedia is full of em dashes.

well played