This is my position with this stuff. It became part of the LLM loop because it’s used a lot- it’s used a lot because it’s effective.

Now we’re going to stop using effective rhetorical methods because they imply AI, even if we know we’re not using AI?

It reminds me of, as a teenager, asking my dad if he ever saw Led Zeppelin live. He hadn’t, because he didn’t really like fans of Led Zeppelin and didn’t want to be associated with them.

As an ashamed fan of certain bands I get this instinct but I also promised to myself when I heard this that I would do my best to not allow other people to influence how I thought about things I enjoyed.

On the same note I’m trying to be “braver” about things like em-dashes, though my personally style has always been to use them as I did in this comment- like this, which I guess distinguishes me, until an LLM picks that up too…

An em dash looks like this

—

You're not using that, neither in the past from what I can tell, nor in this comment.

You're just using a hyphen/minus instead of a colon, that's not an llm-ism

In fact, I'd say it's a dead giveaway for "human impersonating AI impersonating humans". Using the hyphen as an em dash screams

I like to use a lazy variant -- it's not a double dash, or a weirdly written plus, it's a an em-dash that says "I don't even have this key on my keyboard, are you actually using alt-codes or what am I missing?". Not with a shout or a whisper, but with the quiet courage of just being -- but not an incomplete representation of a whole, but rather the fullness of that very distillation of honest, simple pragmatism. Not less, just different.

The above isn't slop. It's shit though!

Actually, in an ancient and venerable markup language that's still in wide use in certain not-unimportant communities:

- = hyphen

-- = n-dash

--- = m-dash

You may notice that he didn't use the double or triple hyphen annotations either - which is usually only used in contexts such as latex, where a post-processor goes over the output for display.

I don’t think it’s quite the same though. The way it constructs thoughts is very algorithmic. If you look at the Wikipedia ai text doc it’s a much better explanation and arguments for not immediately blaming someone for using ai.

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