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Comment by pyridines | Hacker News Reader

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I see nothing in the post that suggests it was written with AI.

It's very clearly written with ChatGPT's authorial voice. The very prominent sprinkling of bold intensifiers, the frequent organization of things into lists to make arguments, the use of emojis in the full context pages, the overwhelming use of em dash to structure sentences, overuse of "it's <whatever> — not <whatever>" type cliches, etc.

It's likely because he's not a native English speaker, hence the perfect grammar and spelling in the contents of the gist, but the obvious grammatical error in the title ("Why I leave Ruby Central") that he likely typed himself.

Given his reason for doing it (non-native speaker), I don't think it's fair to really criticize him for it, but if you can't spot this as AI writing, then you might want to do some research on how to do so.

It’s just a thing people casually throw out now to discredit pieces or indirectly say that the person who wrote the piece is a bad writer

> indirectly say that the person who wrote the piece is a bad writer

or a good writer. A lot of the so-called tells are things that are more likely to be done by professional writers under the care of a professional editor. For example, many people assume the presence of an em dash means text was written by an LLM, when obviously LLMs did not invent punctuation marks.

Good writers who used em dashes before AI tend to use them the traditional way—with no space around them and to emphasize a parenthetical. AI uses it with spaces around it — as an all-purpose conjunction.

Yeah I use em dashes probably every day. It’s only recently that people have started taking issue with it lol

I used to think people here didn't really use them before AI, but I actually downloaded a dataset of all comments over like a decade or so and counted the number of comments with an em dash, and it didn't actually change much around 2022-2023 like I had expected.

It's the spacing that's usually the giveaway to me, as well as the fact that it's not as common for people to use them like semicolons. They use them for parenthetical clauses more often. Any time I see them used with spaces as a general purpose conjunction, THAT'S when I think AI.

I have a very conversational way of writing partially because I do voice to text a lot, so the em dash just “feels” better to me than a semicolon typically.

Agreed: a semi-colon is a bit stop-start, while a en-dash just flows.

I’ve used them, with spaces, for decades. Minus-minus in plain text, and autocorrect reads that nicely.

I sometimes use an em-dash, but mostly in LaTeX: they’re too awkward in plain text.

I use ellipses too …

Not sure why you think this is relevant. The issue is about Ruby Central's failure to make a coherent statement or mea culpa, which the Github post does. AI influence is incidental.

It’s not relevant but that’s the only way wannabe writers can make themselves feel good about not contributing. Imagine discovering the accounting fraud at Exxon back in 2000s and using calculator to prove it, only for people to discount you because you used calculator and didn’t calculate it yourself.

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