Seth Trueger @mdaware.org · 23d oh come on
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First time seeing an ad that helps sexual predators find victims on public transportation
"Catch" a "fifth-grader" ??? really cool child abduction vibes, great choice 🙄 😬
A hyphen, a en dash and an em dash walk into a space bar ...
If you already believed that em dashes were a magical tell that something was written with AI, why would you need software to tell you that? Is this product specifically being marketed to people who don't understand how AI works and ALSO have a rare form of debilitating em-dash blindness???
Take that, literate child!
AI wrote this ad
I used em dashes before digital word processing became common, because I grew up reading Tolkien
Heaven forbid a kid is advanced and uses a little flair in their writing.
You can either wield the — or you can’t. No need to cry about it.
Say it with me, ASCII only
Chicago spotted
I realize this is not the main point, but if you want to "catch" a student using an em dash and doing so with a quick visual skim isn't effortless for you, you can ctrl+F for an em dash. Instant results, no hallucinations.
I grew up reading classic/Victorian literature that is Public Domain. I wrote with an EM-dash because it was in the first literature I was exposed to (Along with Michael Crichton, but I digress). I was the AI all along.
I thought BackMarket was all refurbished make-it-not-e-waste tech. What the hell is this
Fifth graders don't know print industry terms 🤷🏻
I can spot 3 things wrong about that sentence.
"AI-detection" is such a scam
Isn't this a company that sells used electronics?
My god they have some chutzpah. Do they think 5th graders aren't READING BOOKS, the natural habitat of em dashes and punctuation?
Oh no, a smart kid. Quick, get 'em!
There's a certain kind of teacher who is uncomfortable with youth smarts who I'm sure has really enjoyed being able to write work off as AI generated
Don’t keyboards convert double hyphens to em dashes automatically? Yep—they do.
They had to break me OUT of using em-dashes and semicolons in high school. I had the most amazing run-on sentences.
If I catch a 5th grader doing this does it mean I am smarter than a 5th grader?
Even if em dashes were a blanket AI indicator—and they are not—I can also find them with my eyes.
If you need an AI to identify an em dash, were you really ever reading the paper in the first place?
What, by bending it into a hook?
What?!
I think people are getting a bit over-excited. This is not about "catching a 5th grader using an em dash", it's about kids using ai to complete tasks they are supposed to be doing manually. The ad is designed to get attention. Over-use of the em dash by many ai chat-bots just happens to be a "thing"
Or catch a kid with an interest in typography because they want to be a graphic designer and fuck you, you fucking fucks
But, but…Are teachers not READING the writing their kids turn in? You can just SEE the em dash right there (and then praise the kid for using it correctly, or offer suggestions on how to do it better).
it's been on iphone keyboards forever, the violence of this hype cycle against proper typography opening a new annex of hell
I for sure used an em dash in fifth grade in the 20th century
Can't they just stick to refurbishing Gameboys?
Is the implication here that 5th grade pupils shouldn't be using em dashes because they haven't been taught them yet, but are also doing homework of such high importance that teachers need to check if they have used AI to write it?
Is there a reward?
I'm old. A dash is a dash is a dash to me, and I've used them since I first learned to write. Heck, you could've heard them in my speech, I used 'em so much! If you could've figured out which flavor I was using when I was writing all my essays in cursive back in elementary school, then good on ya.
Fuck these people with *all* the dashes.
Back market is sick as hell. You get all kinds of kinky phones without having to haggle in Spanish.
I’ve been AI since 1993(?!) when my fifth grade teacher told me to lay off the dashes because it was getting ridiculous.
let me guess... use the AI to spot the AI
I’m pretty sure I knew how to use em dashes by 5th grade. We did basic punctuation in like K-3. By 5th grade it was more like which punctuation to use depending on the tone you were going for and stuff, and em dashes were solidly in the mix.
Yeah no I'm not taking reading or teaching advice from Back Market
One of the worst things about AI is that we don’t have the epistemological framework to evaluate and assess the products it generates. We need to really think about what we know and how we can be confident we know it. We can’t rely on shortcuts anymore.