zlacker

>>giulio+(OP)
"Recent large-scale upticks in the use of words like “delve” and “intricate” in certain fields, especially education and academic writing, are attributed to the widespread introduction of LLMs with a chat function, like ChatGPT, that overuses those buzzwords."

OK, but please don't do what pg did a year or so ago and dismiss anyone who wrote "delve" as AI writing. I've been using "delve" in speech for 15+ years. It's just a question where and how one learns their English.

>>milanc+p6
Same thing as with em dashes. Some of us have been using em dashes from before ChatGPT.

>>diego_+m8
Genuine question, do you actually use the formal emdash in your writing? AIs are very consistent about using the proper emdash—a double long dash with no spaces around it, whereas humans almost always tend to use a slang version - a single dash with spaces around it. That's because most keyboards don't have an emdash key, and few people even know how to produce an actual emdash.

That's what makes it such a good giveaway. I'm happy to be told that I'm wrong, and that you do actually use the proper double long dash in your writing, but I'm guessing that you actually use the human slang for an emdash, which is visually different and easily sets your writing apart as not AI writing!

>>Taek+Nd
> I'm happy to be told that I'm wrong

I've found that people who say this sort of thing rarely change their beliefs, even after being given evidence that they are wrong. The fact is, as numerous people have pointed out, Word and other editors/word processors change '--' to an em-dash. And the "slang version" of an em-dash is "I went to work--but forgot to put on pants", not "I went to work - but forgot to put on pants".

BTW, "humans almost always tend to use" is very poor writing--pick one or the other between "almost always" and "tend to". It wouldn't be a bad thing if LLMs helped increase human literacy, so I don't know why people are so gung ho on identifying AI output based on utterly non-substantive markers like em-dashes. Having an LLM do homework is a bad thing, but that's not what we're talking about. And someone foolishly using the presence of em-dashes to detect LLM output will utterly fail against someone using an editor macro to replace em-dashes with the gawdawful ' - '.

>>jibal+fT
> Word and other editors/word processors change '--' to an em-dash

I'd be suspicious of people doing their writing in Word and copying it over into random comment fields, too.

> And the "slang version" of an em-dash is "I went to work--but forgot to put on pants", not "I went to work - but forgot to put on pants".

The fun thing about slang is that different groups have different slangs! I use the latter pretty regularly, but have never done the former.

> BTW, "humans almost always tend to use" is very poor writing--pick one or the other between "almost always" and "tend to".

Nah.

> It wouldn't be a bad thing if LLMs helped increase human literacy,

Where "literacy" is defined as strictly following arbitrary rules without any concern for whether it actually helps people read it?

And, on the assumption that those rules actually are meaningful, wouldn't you rather have people learn them for themselves?

>>Nullab+qa1
But do you call that latter thing you do “an em-dash”? Do you tell a peer “You should put an em-dash here” when what you mean is a “space en-dash space”?

>>citize+il1
I don't call it anything, because I'm not in the business of telling people how to write. (Besides asking them not to use SlopGPT, of course.)