Anybody else being annoyed by all this focus on em-dash use to detect AI? In no time, the bad guys will tell their BS machines to avoid em-dashes and "it's not X it's Y" and whatever else people use as "tell-tale signs" and eventually the training data will have picked up on that too. And people who genuinely use em-dashes for taste reasons or are otherwise using expressions considered typical for AI are getting a bad rep.
This is all just demonstrating the helplessness that's coming to our society w.r.t. dealing with gen AI output. Looking for em-dashes is not the solution and distracts from actually having to deal with the problem. (Which is not a technical but a social one. You can't solve it with tech.)
This is turning out to be a huge issue for me as my frequent use of em-dashes makes my remarks trigger people effectively disrupting attempts to communicate. Maybe my communication needs to change or maybe these objections are yet another red flag to watch for.
> Anybody else being annoyed by all this focus on em-dash use to detect AI?
Yes, the “AI detectives” can be quite annoying, as the comments are always the same. No substance, just “has X, it’s AI”. The em-dashes detectives tend to be the worse, because they often refuse to understand that em-dashes are actually trivial to type (depending on OS) and that people have been using them on purpose since before LLMs.
Mind you, using em-dashes as one signal to reinforce what you already perceive as LLM writing is valid, it’s only annoying when it’s used as the sole or principal indicator.
I keep reading about students are learning to intentionally write worse so that it doesn't get flagged as AI-generated. I think it's a systemic problem that won't be solved in the short term, unfortunately.
It's hilarious that em dashes and "it's not X; it's Y" and other trivial things are the best way for humans to spot AI now. Like if AI robots infiltrated us, at first we'd be like "ooh, he has long ears, he's a robot". And after a while the robots will learn to keep their ears shorter. Then what? When we're out of tell-tale signs?
