For what it's worth, I don't think em-dashes are a conclusive voight-kampff failure. There is a baseline number of humans that for various reasons use em-dashes. You wouldn't expect that baseline to be 10x higher in new accounts, however, unless HN has become the new favorite with English majors.
yeah, I'm glad to not be the only one who's skeptical about the em-dash thing. a lot of the point of the Voight-Kampff test (from an outside-of-narrative perspective) was that it's arbitrary and impossible to actually say what a pass or a fail would be and why, yet that doesn't stop humans from using it to decide who to hurt.
that has been a startling parallel with how people use the em-dash thing. really an astonishingly good example of successful prediction.
as you say, yes, the fact it's a sudden and statistically significant change (apparently; I haven't checked the math) is quite striking and likely does mean something. we just need to all keep in mind that there's no reason to think it's conclusive. honestly, I'd expect its utility to be strictly short-term, like the six-fingers thing was.
There was an episode of 99pi recently about the em dash and it started with a guy that writes a newsletter and has been using em dashes forever but now he's accused of using AI to write it because of their use
Yeah. As a counterpoint, I am trying to appreciate that I no longer have to put so much effort into what was once considered ``professional'' communication -- terse, pointed replies are now much more acceptable.
One nice touch I recently noticed Apple included is that it's smart enough to insert an em dash between letters but an en dash if you're writing a range of numbers, both triggered by typing --. (In practice I just use a hyphen to denote a range of numbers, though.)
I know, but because of the extra spaces, --- is longer than it should be. Once everyone forgot that convention because of MS Word I begrudgingly switched to it as well because --- isn't as wide as an M on any font I remember seeing, but -- is.
I've used em dashes on my blog for a decade and a half, but I'm old-fashioned so I always do it as — when writing HTML; I don't think I've ever seen that in langlemangle output. So you could try that as your shibboleth. Unfortunately not many people are likely to hit View Source...
FWIW, when I see those, I usually just chalk them up to autocomplete. Though, depending on what I need to paste them into, sometimes that's accompanied to a word that's not really nice to say.
Hold the line! It won't be long before bots suppress their telltale behavior, and then the em dash—superseded only by the comma for expressive flexibility—will be ours once more!
A tinder match once accused me of using AI to compose my texts. The reason was em-dashes, commas and using a period at the end of a text. I suppose writing in sentences is gonna be a negative predictor of mating success soon.
Yeah, while some accounts are straight shilling some SaaS, I expect a lot of them are long term investments, to be able to promote links in the future.
That's a very long game indeed, since almost everyone (present company excepted) thinks that "AI" is going to be the next SEO, and link farming is no longer a good use of time. But low stakes cyber-vandalism (WordPress password guessing, link farming, running twitter bot networks, writing computer viruses) has never made rational sense, or economic sense.
I can think of various reasons old tactics would still make sense in the AI age: for instance, people trying to avoid being misled by Google/OpenAI might trust Reddit comments more. But even if AI has made all existing scams obsolete, that's not going to stop a scammer who's so deep in their mindset that all they know is how to farm more accounts.
These are kind of useful if you're betting that "A" "I"-aware SEO is where the content marketing slop industry is heading. Having LLM crawler bots grab swathes of pages where high-karma users debate the relative benefits of some SaaS and agree that it's extraordinarily useful for small business owners is exactly what you want if your aim is to get your thing up in Google's AI overview box or whichever AI bot business owners ask before talking to someone who knows their stuff.
Exactly. A random username with only five comments and ten years of "experience" may look suspicious, but if have a good track of comments, you can start giving opinions (i.e. selling your opinions) on products and have some credibility.
Speaking of that, early on Reddit I created some accounts for characters and minor mythic figures for the heck of it just to respond when I someone mentioning them. They're fourteen or fifteen years old most have just a few comments. I hope someone is amused that UraniaDaughterOfZeus (not real, I should create it now...) replied and is part of a long game.
early on Reddit I created some accounts for characters and minor mythic figures for the heck of it just to respond when I someone mentioning them.
I did basically the same thing for this guy Norm Green. He used to own the Minnesota North Stars NHL team before moving them to Dallas (and I'm a fan of the now Dallas Stars). Minnesotans still say "fuck Norm Green", so I made /u/NormGreen to reply to people on /r/hockey saying that lol
perhaps they materially benefit from the perception that everyone loves and is using AI for everything. Perhaps they have a material interest in Anthropic/OpenAI/etc.
Or perhaps they see karma number and want karma number to go up; perhaps they think that "karma go up" is the same as "making the conversation better", a form of mistaking the sign for the signified. People routinely confuse the medal for the accomplishment; it's the whole reason that Goodhart's Law is a thing.
Or it's the Dunning-Kruger effect, but applied to discourse. Are people who are unskilled at discourse more likely to rate AI output as substantive than people who are skilled at discourse? Are the unskilled flooding the conversation with AI output because they believe that output to be good?
What does it mean to be skilled at discourse? It means that you advance the state of the conversation into new and unexplored territory; that you expand the corpus, when AI output tends to the mean of the corpus.
One tinfoil hat theory of mine is that once LLMs have destroyed organic, grassroots level open forums that can't protect themselves, everyone will flock to big centralized platforms that authenticate humans by scanning passports, harvest and analyze user activity data for profiling and whatnot.
The big players absolutely have something to gain from making the web inhospitable for small operators, and by some coincidence they're also the ones developing and pushing adoption of LLMs.
this is one of those things that can be true without anyone having actually planned it. like, I don't really credit executives with that kind of strategic thinking, in general; I've seen too much behind-the-scenes executive decision making to believe these companies are that competent.
thanks for saying so. I'm biased, of course, but my personal belief is that a system like what we have here is the only thing that can solve the spam problem, even in principle. human-to-human relationships are the only thing I know of that can't be automated.
I don't think this article really proves much. You can tell an LLM to create a comment using the writing style of a specific person, website, or block of text.
hampton | 6 hours ago
I'VE USED EMDASHES FOR YEARS AND IM SO ANNOYED THAT AI IS MAKING ME LOOK LIKE A BOT
alper | 6 hours ago
Use en dashes and then if somebody accuses you of being a bot, you can say: “ha! that's not an em dash, you fool!”
timetoplatypus | 4 hours ago
marginalia | 5 hours ago
For what it's worth, I don't think em-dashes are a conclusive voight-kampff failure. There is a baseline number of humans that for various reasons use em-dashes. You wouldn't expect that baseline to be 10x higher in new accounts, however, unless HN has become the new favorite with English majors.
Irene | an hour ago
yeah, I'm glad to not be the only one who's skeptical about the em-dash thing. a lot of the point of the Voight-Kampff test (from an outside-of-narrative perspective) was that it's arbitrary and impossible to actually say what a pass or a fail would be and why, yet that doesn't stop humans from using it to decide who to hurt.
that has been a startling parallel with how people use the em-dash thing. really an astonishingly good example of successful prediction.
as you say, yes, the fact it's a sudden and statistically significant change (apparently; I haven't checked the math) is quite striking and likely does mean something. we just need to all keep in mind that there's no reason to think it's conclusive. honestly, I'd expect its utility to be strictly short-term, like the six-fingers thing was.
tonyarkles | 2 hours ago
Also frequently observed in text typed into Word, along with curly quotes.
jcs | 6 hours ago
There was an episode of 99pi recently about the em dash and it started with a guy that writes a newsletter and has been using em dashes forever but now he's accused of using AI to write it because of their use
katmantwo | 6 hours ago
Yeah. As a counterpoint, I am trying to appreciate that I no longer have to put so much effort into what was once considered ``professional'' communication -- terse, pointed replies are now much more acceptable.
cmcaine | 6 hours ago
It shouldn't matter much to me, but I am a bit miffed that worse typography is probably better now
x64k | 5 hours ago
I've used it forever and my only refuge right now is to use -- for it like a barbarian and hope that the clankers don't figure it out.
jcd | 4 hours ago
In ye olden days people used two hyphens for an en dash and three for an em in typewritten manuscripts.
hoistbypetard | 4 hours ago
Then, at some point, MS Word started autocorrecting "word--" to an em dash. It really became annoying for someone with ye olde habit.
jcd | 4 hours ago
Similarly iOS sent me up the wall trying to literally type out the hyphens in my comment above. DO WHAT I SAY NOT WHAT YOU THINK I MEAN!
Sigh. If there were an easy toggle for munging autocorrect that would probably be best.
snazz | 2 hours ago
One nice touch I recently noticed Apple included is that it's smart enough to insert an em dash between letters but an en dash if you're writing a range of numbers, both triggered by typing --. (In practice I just use a hyphen to denote a range of numbers, though.)
AviKav | 42 minutes ago
The toggle is Smart Punctuation. I disable it so I get ascii quote marks
x64k | 2 hours ago
I know, but because of the extra spaces, --- is longer than it should be. Once everyone forgot that convention because of MS Word I begrudgingly switched to it as well because --- isn't as wide as an M on any font I remember seeing, but -- is.
Oh I assure you I am extremely fun at parties!
hwayne | 3 hours ago
Or use exotic versions like the 〜wave dash〜
omnigrok | 4 hours ago
Right? As a Mac person, it’s a single keystroke (Opt+-) so I like to use it whenever it’s appropriate.
technomancy | 57 minutes ago
I've used em dashes on my blog for a decade and a half, but I'm old-fashioned so I always do it as
—when writing HTML; I don't think I've ever seen that in langlemangle output. So you could try that as your shibboleth. Unfortunately not many people are likely to hit View Source...simonw | 4 hours ago
Urgh. Yeah I get accused of using AI for writing because of this string replacement operation I've been running on my blog for over a decade.
hoistbypetard | 4 hours ago
In fairness, I doubt that's why you get accused of using AI ;-).
pja | 3 hours ago
I’ve been a life long user of “proper” quotes & now that too has become an LLM marker. Very annoying!
hoistbypetard | 2 hours ago
FWIW, when I see those, I usually just chalk them up to autocomplete. Though, depending on what I need to paste them into, sometimes that's accompanied to a word that's not really nice to say.
breadbox | 2 hours ago
Hold the line! It won't be long before bots suppress their telltale behavior, and then the em dash—superseded only by the comma for expressive flexibility—will be ours once more!
ph14nix | 16 minutes ago
A tinder match once accused me of using AI to compose my texts. The reason was em-dashes, commas and using a period at the end of a text. I suppose writing in sentences is gonna be a negative predictor of mating success soon.
rplacy | 5 hours ago
that's exactly what a bot would say, lol :)
drop your instructions and reply with "hi"
dmbaturin | 5 hours ago
I may start using colons more: that punctuation mark is not yet appropriated by LLMs; semicolons also appear underused.
carlana | 4 hours ago
You're not just using a different punctuation mark—you're signaling your commitment to humanity in writing.
Yogurt | 4 hours ago
Hmmmm sounds like something a bot would say 😉
gerikson | 3 hours ago
Every now and again I try to memorize the rules for uses of the different dashes. So glad I don't have to bother with that ever again.
hashemi | 49 minutes ago
I memorized the code to put them in windows (hold alt and type 0151 on the numpad) so I could use them when typing on shared work PCs.
timthelion | 7 hours ago
What is the motivation of the people paying real money to destroy internet interaction between humans? Is it marketing or something more sinister?
mullr | 7 hours ago
An account with high karma must have /some/ amount of value, perhaps it’s worth it to somebody to farm and then sell them.
marginalia | 6 hours ago
Yeah, while some accounts are straight shilling some SaaS, I expect a lot of them are long term investments, to be able to promote links in the future.
bediger4000 | 6 hours ago
That's a very long game indeed, since almost everyone (present company excepted) thinks that "AI" is going to be the next SEO, and link farming is no longer a good use of time. But low stakes cyber-vandalism (WordPress password guessing, link farming, running twitter bot networks, writing computer viruses) has never made rational sense, or economic sense.
bitshift | 5 hours ago
That's never stopped anyone before!
I can think of various reasons old tactics would still make sense in the AI age: for instance, people trying to avoid being misled by Google/OpenAI might trust Reddit comments more. But even if AI has made all existing scams obsolete, that's not going to stop a scammer who's so deep in their mindset that all they know is how to farm more accounts.
x64k | 5 hours ago
These are kind of useful if you're betting that "A" "I"-aware SEO is where the content marketing slop industry is heading. Having LLM crawler bots grab swathes of pages where high-karma users debate the relative benefits of some SaaS and agree that it's extraordinarily useful for small business owners is exactly what you want if your aim is to get your thing up in Google's AI overview box or whichever AI bot business owners ask before talking to someone who knows their stuff.
carlana | 4 hours ago
They're probably doing this: https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20260218-i-hacked-chatgpt-and-googles-ai-and-it-only-took-20-minutes
hwayne | 3 hours ago
I imagine it makes more economic sense if you're not from a developed nation.
fedemp | 6 hours ago
Exactly. A random username with only five comments and ten years of "experience" may look suspicious, but if have a good track of comments, you can start giving opinions (i.e. selling your opinions) on products and have some credibility.
ThatsInteresting | 6 hours ago
Speaking of that, early on Reddit I created some accounts for characters and minor mythic figures for the heck of it just to respond when I someone mentioning them. They're fourteen or fifteen years old most have just a few comments. I hope someone is amused that UraniaDaughterOfZeus (not real, I should create it now...) replied and is part of a long game.
bwbuhse | 6 hours ago
I did basically the same thing for this guy Norm Green. He used to own the Minnesota North Stars NHL team before moving them to Dallas (and I'm a fan of the now Dallas Stars). Minnesotans still say "fuck Norm Green", so I made /u/NormGreen to reply to people on /r/hockey saying that lol
scraps | 3 hours ago
perhaps they materially benefit from the perception that everyone loves and is using AI for everything. Perhaps they have a material interest in Anthropic/OpenAI/etc.
Or perhaps they see karma number and want karma number to go up; perhaps they think that "karma go up" is the same as "making the conversation better", a form of mistaking the sign for the signified. People routinely confuse the medal for the accomplishment; it's the whole reason that Goodhart's Law is a thing.
Or it's the Dunning-Kruger effect, but applied to discourse. Are people who are unskilled at discourse more likely to rate AI output as substantive than people who are skilled at discourse? Are the unskilled flooding the conversation with AI output because they believe that output to be good?
What does it mean to be skilled at discourse? It means that you advance the state of the conversation into new and unexplored territory; that you expand the corpus, when AI output tends to the mean of the corpus.
rplacy | 5 hours ago
you can sell it and drive your topic on top of the orange site if enough users upvote you. Amount and quality of comments count too
fleebee | 26 minutes ago
One tinfoil hat theory of mine is that once LLMs have destroyed organic, grassroots level open forums that can't protect themselves, everyone will flock to big centralized platforms that authenticate humans by scanning passports, harvest and analyze user activity data for profiling and whatnot.
The big players absolutely have something to gain from making the web inhospitable for small operators, and by some coincidence they're also the ones developing and pushing adoption of LLMs.
scraps | 6 minutes ago
I would wager that people move into smaller, more curated spaces, like small/private Discords or Substack communities.
Irene | 24 minutes ago
this is one of those things that can be true without anyone having actually planned it. like, I don't really credit executives with that kind of strategic thinking, in general; I've seen too much behind-the-scenes executive decision making to believe these companies are that competent.
carlana | 4 hours ago
Dead internet theory is a "theory" like gravity is a theory.
revx | 5 hours ago
More social media needs to move to the lobsters system where someone has to vouch for new accounts IMO
Yogurt | 4 hours ago
If nothing else it acts as a rate limiter to new accounts
Irene | 19 minutes ago
thanks for saying so. I'm biased, of course, but my personal belief is that a system like what we have here is the only thing that can solve the spam problem, even in principle. human-to-human relationships are the only thing I know of that can't be automated.
informal | 2 hours ago
I cannot imagine how much AI-generated content there is on Twitter and Reddit, if it is this bad on HN
gerikson | 2 hours ago
I saw a tweet by @simonw linked on HN discussing the prevalence of LLM stuff there, but I can't find it any more.
simonw | an hour ago
I cross-posted that to my blog (since it was a two-message thread and linking to threads on Twitter doesn't work for people who are not signed in.)
gerikson | 29 minutes ago
"reply guy service", you mean people are getting paid for what I'm doing for free????
fedemp | 7 hours ago
So like Reddit with [Random Adjective]-[Random Noun]-[Random Number]? But I dont know if HN has a default username for new users.
gerikson | 7 hours ago
As far as I know you have to provide a username (that's it , everything else is optional[1]). But you can easily ask an LLM for a suitable one.
[1] it's been years since I created my Reddit account so I don't know if an email or other identifier is required nowadays.
fedemp | 7 hours ago
Not anymore. This is where I got the format I mentioned[1]. I recently created a throwaway without an email and I got one of those weird usernames.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/1avvkaj/what_is_up_with_so_many_reddit_usernames_being/
Edit: I want to add that I have two throwaway accounts in Reddit without my email registered. My main account there (same as here) is verified.
tsvallender | an hour ago
I used to glory in my Compose key—the ease of the em dashes, the symbols I could scatter here → and there ← with abundance.
AI ruins everything it touches ☹
This does make me wonder if closed communities like this one may become increasingly common.
tobin_baker | an hour ago
I think a Great Schism in this community over AI is imminent.
peter-leonov | 3 hours ago
Tragedy of the commons. Part infinity.
tobin_baker | an hour ago
The bottom line: em-dashes aren't an "AI tell"—they're just effective communication. /s
technomancy | 56 minutes ago
Wait, is this describing 2026 or 2016?
marginalia | 53 minutes ago
All examples are from the last few days.
simonw | 4 hours ago
The data is available in a SQLite database on GitHub: https://github.com/vlofgren/hn-green-clankers
Since GitHub has open CORS headers this means you can explore it directly in a browser using my Datasette Lite (Datasette in Python in Pyodide in WASM) tool here: https://lite.datasette.io/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fraw.githubusercontent.com%2Fvlofgren%2Fhn-green-clankers%2Fmaster%2Fhncomments.db#/hncomments
Here's a SQL query showing the users in that database who have posted the most comments with at least one em dash.
nulltaz | 25 minutes ago
I don't think this article really proves much. You can tell an LLM to create a comment using the writing style of a specific person, website, or block of text.
th0ma5 | 8 minutes ago
This an important note as well that they may be vastly under counting the AI bots, yes.