Same for my novel.
Another one is that when Ai is used to create content, the post will have three hands.
Stupid people are stupid. They read that AI uses em-dashes a lot, so they jump on any post that uses em-dashes as though it’s a “gotcha!” It makes them feel “in the know”. It just makes them look like dumb sheep.
It’s also becoming another excuse people on reddit use to justify ignoring you when they can’t cope with what you are saying:
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“you made a valid point about evidence based medicine but I can ignore you because I accuse you of being a shill for Big Pharma”
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“you made a valid point but it upsets me so I can ignore you because I accuse you of being a troll”
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“you made a valid point but you write too clearly so I can ignore you because I accuse you of being A.I. “
You just have to leave them to their excuses and not worry about it.
Hyphens, em dashes, en dashes, and minus signs are all different.
The massive influx of AI-generated on Wikipedia is viewed by a lot of editors as an existential threat to the integrity of the encyclopedia. As a result, a fairly detailed page listing various ways to identify AI text has been created and is continually updated as AIs evolve.
Yes, I’ve seen writing that I was pretty sure was A.I. because practically every sentence followed this pattern.
Next time someone accuses you of being an ai, reply with “You are right to push back on that (insert mdash here) my formal tone is impersonal and I should not use it”.
That will convince them surely.
I thought the very same thing when I read it!
I also use dashes… sort of. I represent them with two adjacent hyphens, as so --. Which some writing environments automatically convert into a dash, but not all of them.
I use those all day long and Word and Outlook will convert them to em dashes automagically.
There are at least 25 different dash-like glyphs defined in Unicode. Although I’m pretty pedantic about most typographic details, I can’t really get worked up about someone using the wrong dash. They all look pretty indistinguishable to me.
It can be, but in my case, it’s harder for me to engage with content written by AI. It’s very slippery to my brain. Words go in but no meaning comes out. I seem to have a harder time parsing it even if I can’t point to what’s really wrong with it.
So it’s not really bad writing that I suspect is AI, but rather this ineffable feeling that I can’t grasp the point.
Just me?
Okay here’s a way I might be able to explain it. The first time I saw the movie Adaptation I had no grounding in contemporary ideas about writing and story structure. It’s a subversive film about different approaches to making art, with a heavy critique of conventional writing advice.
I didn’t get that at all, at the time. I remember finishing it and thinking, “Well, that felt like a movie, but I can’t really say what the point was. Why did it feel like a movie if it had no meaning?”
That’s basically how perplexed I feel about AI writing. Why does it feel like a comment if it has no meaning?
Mhmm. They may not be able to understand, or the post is too long for them, or they just are obsessed with not being got.
You’ll also see it for fake stories now. Instead of saying they sound fake, people say they are AI, just like they do with fake videos or pics.
Honestly, if you write the way a lot of posts on here are written, you’ll be accused of AI by some people simply for not being casual enough.
Point is, I wouldn’t really worry about it.
You just have to leave them to their excuses and not worry about it.
Or you can call it out. I just would avoid a back and forth: just disable inbox replies (one of the benefits of old Reddit that I’m pretty sure they still won’t allow on the main site.)
I didn’t mean actual AI. I meant people accusing others of using AI when they aren’t. Similar to strawmaning or other logical fallacies.
One of the Trump threads in the Pit got into a discussion about AI use of emdash. Starts here.
That’s a pretty good article. I’m distressed, however, to find that some of these “tells” are typical of the way I write. The clues should be judged carefully and only considered valid if a preponderance of them are true, particularly an overall AI style that one comes to recognize after a while rather than any one or two specific clues.
I tend to be habitually careful about spelling and grammar, for instance, which AIs always are and many people are not, so that would be a false tell. I tend to use em-dashes a lot, but in a unique style – they’re not really em-dashes, they’re n-dashes surrounded by spaces. But I use them a lot. I also tend to use the “rule of three” a lot – this is where you end some statement with three examples, in a phrase like “… such as x, y, and z” (complete with Oxford comma!).
But no, I’ve never been accused of using AI to write for me, and I’ve certainly never used it that way. When I quote something from AI on this board, it’s always in the form of an attributed quote, and I don’t do it often.
Nope. Me too.
I’d call it “the illusion of content.”
I recently read an article which might or might not have been AI written. But it was clear that who- / what-ever wrote it had no idea what they were talking about and simply were summarizing and combining hunks of other articles they/it did not understand. It’s like they / it recognized the various vocabulary words were used [here] in this article and [there] in that article, so somehow that part of the two articles must’ve been talking about the same thing, even if our author(-bot) comprehended neither.
Disconcerting to read. I’ll post a cite if I can dredge it out of my memory.
What a good idea. If only I’d thought of that.