Mike Masnick @masnick.com · Jun 6 Lol. Hey AI checkers, you're not taking my freaking —'s away. Before AI existed I had set up keyboard combinations to make them, because that's how I write. So this is why they say it's 100% AI. Because 6 emdashes, 1 triad, and 1 ai phrase ("relentless"). Fucking hell.
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This is also exactly how I learned to write-- emdashes and triads all over the goddamned place.
This is an outrage!
Sending you some spares I had lying around. — — — — — — — — — — — —
Triads. Lol. You mean the rhetorical device that was common in classical Greek and Latin and has influenced the rhetoric of all the descendants therefrom? Jesus.
Also, aren't triads one of the most natural things in human creativity and aesthetics, to the point people literally say "Rule of Threes" as an expression?
“If you use proper grammar, you’ll be accused of using AI…”
I was literally taught triads were the way to give examples. I do only use automatic Word en-dashes mostly, but I find and replace with em-dashes when getting ready to final.
LOL! I am the same way, I use the compose key in Linux and Wincompose on Windows so that I can have my endashes – I don't use the emdash because the Oxford style guide discourages it. Also, LLMs trained off how we write. I delight in writing "not just X but Y" or making groups of three.
All I'm seeing from these is that if you use an uncommon LLM, you'd sail on through without issue. Bunch of these are very tied to specific models. Not even just companies, but the model itself.
YES this exactly. I am gonna emdash. I refuse to apologize for learning, and using, proper punctuation!
if you don't use triads, you're just a bad writer, I think
wait you're telling me there are people who *don't* have alt+0151 memorized so they can type em dashes without skipping a beat??
I feel like that goose meme honking 'where did ai learn these features from?'
I've always been an em-dash lover and have the pre-AI paper trail. Did Roger Rosenblatt ever write an essay (a paragraph?) without a triad?
“You identify as an AI writer because our AIs were trained on your writing, please turn yourself in for reprocessing at the nearest Meat Slurper™️ posthaste”
Maybe the problem is the AI is trained on YOU. 😅
Why does AI write in triads? Because that's a rhetorical technique that's so common it was all over the training data, ffs.
Lol. What garbage. (I *also* have custom keyboard shortcuts for dashes – both em AND en. And also ellipses and non-breaking spaces and hair spaces and … ahem, well, anyway.)
To check students work for AI I generally go straight to ChatGPT (and Copilot, etc.) and put in the assignment, something like “give me a comment for this discussion board post…” (1/?)
That’s human writers for you, famously not loving em dashes
Yeah I’m starting to think it ultimately will be the ai checkers that will kill prose, not the llms
I maintain my theory that you pissed off Peter Thiel or someone like him and as revenge all AI are now repeatedly trained on Techdirt just to mess with you.
What is additionally infuriating about this is that the LLMs use these technics specifically because people like you — and, obviously, others — produced books, articles, and blogs posts long ago that train their models. They wouldn’t write like this if we didn’t already write like this!
I've had the alt codes for – & — memorized and specifically bought external keyboards that had number pads—even though laptops have integrated keyboards—specifically so I could en/em dash to my little heart's content LONG before AI was a thing. AI learned emdashes from ME.
It is crazy that standard practices of good writing are now identified and labeled by AI as proof of nonhuman writing. AI needs to sit down and actually read a fucking book (instead of ingesting all of them at once).
I love the em dash! I’ve used it forever. It sucks that it’s associated with AI writing now!
They're using automated systems to detect automated systems because the automated systems are garbage and wonder why people say their automated systems are garbage.
Have you seen the group that created a new em dash symbol that (for now) generative AI can’t use? It works on two custom fonts they published: “Times New Human” and “Areal” www.theamdash.com
"Grouping ideas in threes" -- the thing they teach you in journalism or communications school, and writing classes, because it directly uses human psychology. Em dashes are called cigarettes because they're long, thin and addictive. Gee, wonder why AI picked up on it as a pattern?
Maybe SHOUT IN ALL CAPS, slip in dumb misuses—like “rein” when you mean “reign”—smile when autocarrot changes “its” to “it’s” and stick commas where they don’t belong… Maybe then you can use em dashes to space-efficiently separate asides, etc to be seen as an illiterate person vs a bot
Parallelism and triads for emphasis are rhetorical devices that have been around for millennia…..
I mean come on. A hyphen is not a dash; it’s for hyphenation. Two hyphens became a stand-in for dashes because there were no dashes on typewriter keyboards. The two most common editing macros have always been “replace two spaces with one after a period” and “replace double hyphens with an emdash.”
. Fuckin-A (My profile):
AI is making a relentless push to steal our voice, our credibility — and our trust. It's not AI-detection, it's for-profit linguistic homogenization. Or something like that.
I just fed it both my favorites of the week... 100 human. but I keep saying I'm not human... this gets confusing.
FWIW this is not how they determine it.
I used them a lot in technical documents. System architecture documents, low level implementation documents, etc. Depending on settings Word will create them if you type two dashes in a row.
one thing is that Pangram does say that the "evidence" list is a totally separate system from the AI/not AI estimation (which is very confusing)
Sorry, you've got to use two hyphens now.
What? Triads are an AI thing, allegedly? IIRC I was taught as a kid to try to give examples or make points in a triad (without being taught the name). Plus three always seems like a good number: two isn’t general enough and four is too many.
triads? really? Writing things in 3's is extremely common. The AIs learned it from us.
The en-dash steals the show here, but it's still a fine opportunity to marvel at Elle Cordova's brilliance... www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky0Y...