Top posts on Reddit startup communities are increasingly being generated by AI

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4 points·guywithahat··5 comments

Git repo: https://github.com/v4nn4/em-dash-conspiracy

Obviously we cannot verifiably prove this, which is why it's called the em-dash conspiracy, however it is an interesting change at the very least.

Every time em-dash is discussed, there are floods of people who swear blindly they always previously used em-dash all the time.

But the numbers don't lie. Before LLMs, em-dash usage in online text was minimal.

Whether it's now actual GPT output or people emulating GPT, is a different difficult question.

I'm convinced that the majority of people who claim that they used the em dash actually just used a hyphen - with spaces and everything.

It's also not just the presence of the em dash for me. You combine it with perfect grammar and the predictable "tone", and ChatGPT answers are extremely predictable.

Sorry if I'm the 40th person to post this repo, that didn't occur to me until I saw your phrasing.

I do agree though, ChatGPT and AI all have common ways of speaking, and they use a lot more punctuation than most people.

1. As far as I know there is no keyboard layout (especially for English), that has an em-dash key, they all have hyphen/minus.

2. As far as I know, only MS Word will auto-correct the use of a hyphen to an em-dash. In all other instances - ESPECIALLY text boxes on web - if the user uses the hyphen-space-hypen pattern then it will posted like that verbatim.

So either a lot of people are drafting their posts in Word first, and then pasting into Reddit/elsewhere. Or...

It it looks/quacks/walks like a duck and all that.

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