I don’t like to accuse, and the article is fine overall, but this stinks: “This transparency transforms git history from a record of changes into a record of intent, creating a new form of documentation that bridges human reasoning and machine implementation.”
> I don’t like to accuse, and the article is fine overall, but this stinks:
Now consider your reasonable instinct to not accuse other people coupled with the possibility setting AI lose with “write a positive article about AI where you have some paragraphs about the current limitations based on this link. write like you are just following the evidence.” Meanwhile we are supposed to sit here and weigh every word.
This reminds to write a prompt for a blogpost. How AI could be used for making personal-looking tech-guy who meditates and runs websites. (Do we have the technology? Yes we do)
The sentence itself is a smeLLM. Grandiose pronouncements aren't a bot exclusive, but man do they love making them, especially about creative paradigms and dynamics
Can we please stop using the em-dash as a metric to “detect” LLM writing? It’s lazy and wrong. Plenty of people use em-dashes, it’s a useful punctuation mark. If humans didn’t use them, they wouldn’t be in the LLM training data.
There are better clues, like the kind of vague pretentious babble bad marketers use to make their products and ideas seem more profound than they are. It’s a type of bad writing which looks grandiose but is ultimately meaningless and that LLMs heavily pick up on.
That’s not true at all. Apple’s OS by default have smart punctuation enabled and convert -- (two hyphens) into — (“em-dash”; not an “en-dash”, which has a different purpose), " " (dumb quotes) into “ ” (smart quotes), and so forth.
Furthermore, on macOS there are simple key combinations (e.g. with ⌥) to make all sort of smart punctuation even if you don’t have the feature enabled by default, and on iOS you can long press on a key (such as the hyphen) to see alternates.
The majority of people may not use correct punctuation marks, but enough do that assuming a single character immediately means they used an LLM is just plain wrong. I have never used an LLM to write a blog post, internet comment, or anything of the sort, and I have used smart punctuation in all my writing for over a decade. Same with plenty of other HN commenters, journalists, writers, editors, and on and on. You don’t need to be a literal machine to care about correct character use.
So we’ve established the default is a hyphen, not an em dash.
You can certainly select an em dash but most don’t know what it means and don’t use it.
It’s certainly not infallible proof but multiple uses of it in comments online (vs published material or newspapers) are very unusual, so I think it’s an interesting indicator. I completely agree it is common in some texts, usually ones from publishing houses with style guides but also people who know about writing or typography.
Blog posts, news articles, and other web texts have been using correct punctuation marks for a long time. I know because I’ve been noticing misuses (usually having switched or repeated characters for quotes) for over a decade.
Plenty of people care about typographic punctuation, and others use software (such as Apple’s OSs, markdown converters, publishing and editing tools) which auto-converts smart punctuation. Heck, tools for doing that are older than Markdown, and that is already two decades old.
Look, nowhere have I said using an em-dash can’t be an indicator, my objection is people using it as the indicator. It’s become a meme. Too many people act like if the existence of a single em-dash immediately and conclusively proves it was written by an LLM. It does not.
> this stinks: “This transparency transforms git history from a record of changes into a record of intent, creating a new form of documentation that bridges human reasoning and machine implementation.”
That's where I stopped reading. If they needed "AI" for turning their git history into a record of intent ("transparency"), then they had been doing it all wrong, previously. Git commit messages have always been a "form of documentation that bridges human reasoning" -- namely, with another human's (the reader's) reasoning.
If you don't walk your reviewer through your patch, in your commit message, as if you were teaching them, then you're doing it wrong.
I did human notes -> had Claude condense and edit -> manually edit. A few of the sentences (like the stinky one below) were from Claude which I kept if it matched my own thoughts, though most were changed for style/prose.
I'm still experimenting with it. I find it can't match style at all, and even with the manual editing it still "smells like AI" as you picked up. But, it also saves time.
My prompt was essentially "here are my old blog posts, here's my notes on reading a bunch of AI generated commits, help me condense this into a coherent article about the insights I learned"
I wish there were a way to opt-out of LLM generated text and see the prompt. In any context. It's always more informative, more human, more memorable, more accurate, and more representative of what the author was actually trying to convey.
