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Comment by judge2020 | Hacker News Reader

judge2020·

Were semicolons in subheadings common before AI? This subheading of the TomsHardware article just seems very artificial:

> The fingerprint only switched the USB connection on; nothing on the card was encrypted.

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Oh god dammit, I have to stop using semicolons now? That's stupid.

Less semicolons overall, more the "statement; reveal/impact" formula that current frontier models like.

They were if you read a news source that catered to literate readers.

Not long ago it would have been an em dash.

I mean, it's a terrible subheading because it's way too long, but it's grammatically correct. It doesn't read like AI to me, why do you think it is?

The issue with AI-produced text is rarely bad grammar these days (if anything, that's a marker of human-written text now!), but rather stiff-sounding constructions that humans don't actually use. In this case — semicolons are grammatically correct, but very few people actually use them them (same for em-dashes like what I just used, but you can pry them from my cold, dead fingers).

I’d expect people writing for a living to understand and use semicolons.

I absolutely use semicolons when writing professionally. They're just basic parts of grammar, and if you want to be taken seriously by some parts of the world (academia, I'm glaring angrily at you), you would use them.

I guess it comes down to expectations? You don't expect formal conventions from a website writer, while I absolutely do.

I find it interesting that it was a flag for AI writing for you. That's going to make me consider my voice in certain situations now.

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