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The Programmer Identity Crisis

(hojberg.xyz)
270 points imasl42 | 3 comments | 21 Oct 25 16:47 UTC | HN request time: 0.803s | 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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psunavy03 ◴[21 Oct 25 17:11 UTC] No.45658389[source]▶
That says more about your lack of writing skills and understanding of grammar than AI.
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gdulli ◴[21 Oct 25 18:40 UTC] No.45659822[source]▶
That's a silly take, just because they existed and were proper grammar before AI slop popularized them doesn't mean they're not statistically likely to indicate slop today, depending on the context.
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psunavy03 ◴[21 Oct 25 19:28 UTC] No.45660496[source]▶
What's sillier is people associating em-dashes with AI slop specifically because they are unsophisticated enough never to have learned how to use them as part of their writing, and assuming everyone else must be as poor of a writer as they are.

It's the literary equivalent of thinking someone must be a "hacker" because they have a Bash terminal open.

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1. gdulli ◴[21 Oct 25 21:00 UTC] No.45661640[source]▶
You're overthinking it. LLMs exploded the prevalence of em-dashes. That doesn't mean you should assume any instance of an em-dash means LLM content, but it's a reasonable heuristic at the moment.
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2. psunavy03 ◴[21 Oct 25 22:44 UTC] No.45662682[source]▶
> That doesn't mean you should assume any instance of an em-dash means LLM content

No, it doesn't. But people are putting that out there, people are getting accused of using AI because they know how to use em dashes properly, and this is dumb.

3. Terr_ ◴[22 Oct 25 09:10 UTC] No.45666545[source]▶
> but it's a reasonable heuristic

I dunno, I feel like the base rate fallacy [0] could easily become a factor... Especially if we don't even have an idea what the false-positive or false-negative rates are yet, let alone true prevalence.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy