Hacker News Reader

Comment by michaelmior | Hacker News Reader

The announcement didn't read as AI-generated to me at all. Of course this is far from foolproof, but ZeroGPT says 0% AI.

View on HN

It contains four emdashes, it overuses the Rule of Three (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing#...), it has the typical "not X, but Y" sentence, it unduly emphasizes the significance of Buqtrack (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing#...) ("preservation for the ages", really?).

Also, in my experience, LLMs seem to love to say something went "dark" or "silent", to mention a "generation" of people, and to say something "matters". "no corporate filter" also seems like a strange thing to say.

I think it's just regular corporate speech. LLMs do this, because they've learned on this kind of posts.

Em-dashes were in common use long before LLMs existed — anyone saying that’s a sign of LLM use should not be listened to. They’re used by LLMs because they were trained on good writing and we shouldn’t avoid using them any more than we should stop using correct punctuation for the same reason.

> anyone saying that’s a sign of LLM use should not be listened to

You don't need to believe me. You can read the studies about its statistically higher occurrence in LLM writing vs human writing (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.27006) or you can do the analysis yourself.

Also, no one said you should stop using them. But overusing them, along with emulating some of the other common traits of LLM generated writing, will give people the impression that you didn't bother to write something yourself.

You’re misunderstanding the problem: LLMs using emdashes more than the average human still doesn’t tell you that the poster you’re interacting with now is an LLM and not one of the many humans who used emdashes before LLMs existed and are the reason why LLM training picked that up as a good trait. Humans shouldn’t stop writing well just because bots were trained to mimic them.

One other problem with this as a heuristic is technical: they used to be hard to enter on Windows so mostly only professionally-edited text there had em-dashes while the ease of entry on Mac, iOS, Android, and to a lesser extent Linux meant that they were more common there. I suspect that this list disproportionately lists Mac users:

https://www.gally.net/miscellaneous/hn-em-dash-user-leaderbo...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com