this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2026
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LinkedinLunatics
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A place to post ridiculous posts from linkedIn.com
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And of course:
Bruh, I'm calling shenanigans on this tool. Yes, post is probably ai, but there is no tool that can accurately tell ai text from human text. "The most accurate ai detector" is like me calling a stick "the most accurate god detector". It's a meaningless distinction when the detection isn't possible to do accurately.
But it's useful when you need to start a witch hunt on a post you dislike!
Horseshit detector: this is
I feel like because LinkedIn people all write like bits. The em dash is major red flag but without it, seems like a typical linkedin post
It's that em-dash at the end that really solidified it for me. Was kinda on the fence most of the way through.
They had me at:
honestly?
My wife is a professional writer and uses em dash a lot, usually as --, including in her casual messages, as it's common for her to use.
It's the formatting style of the whole thing that sounds AI to me. "Honestly" phrases really jumps out at me now, as well as the "But..." fragments. Not that they're bad, hell, I type out things that way too. But for it to be all together, it sounds AI after you've seen it a lot.
The em dash is fine here, emphasizing the final point. Although I would have probably used a comma myself for a post and not a formal manuscript.
Funny thing is, you can get AI to reduce a lot of these tells with a decent system prompt and staging of the writing process. So I'm surprised we're still seeing it a lot and it hasn't been weaned out of the latest versions.
It's really hard to get rid of things caused by systematic bias in the training data.
After inhaling the entire internet, LLMs started being trained on publically available books.
And due to copyright, those were older ones from a time when em-dashes were used more.
The training results were tested by humans, which needed to be cheap, but also English language natives.
So they used workers in English-speaking African countries. Where the English taught in school is also more traditional with a focus on older literature.
"Due to copyright" did they not all illegally download every book they could, copyrighted or not, to train their LLMs?
Fair enough on the em-dash, hadn't actually considered that LLMs use it extensively because it's actually used in the wild.
The use of "--" is interesting, I use dashes to convey pacing constantly because I type as I speak, and so punctuation to me is largely about trying to write the delivery I want the reader to percieve, and I always just use "-" knowing it's incorrect, but I don't exactly wanna make myself seem even more like ai by switching lol
I may try using "--", thanks for sharing that!
I actually used to do the same thing with the -, and by em dash becoming a thing I dived into the usage and history of it all, including ; and en dash. And now I'm using - less. But I don't use em dash more, just tend to throw a comma in.
Another weird one I learned. em dash spacing. The spacing AI tends to use is not preferred by publishers now, but is more AP style, perhaps picking it up from when it was more popular to have space between the letters. Europe tends to prefer spacing but with a en dash (and I kind of like how that looks too, but it doesn't fly if you publish in the US).
Wait, so what spacing is generally preferred for the em dash? Thats interesting, I never formally learned how to use one so I'm curious (I've not been to college, I have no idea if its part of typical higher education curriculum if you take any english courses)
I abuse the fuck out of commas so I reach for dashes or ; when I want a longer pause that isn't a logical end point for a thought. But a semicolon feels somehow a bit more formal to me, so I use it less for general online chatting
This seems well sourced and current.
https://www.pbjstories.com/blog/spaces-around-em-dash
No spacing I think—just back-to-back like so
Yeah a human wouldn't have used an em dash there. It would have been a colon or an ellipse.
that batman image,, uhh,,, recite it from memory,,, batman says "this is the tool of the enemy, we shall not use it" or something,,, idk,,,
(...why?? does lemmy collapse the commas into one??? eww
and uses the unicode ellipsis??? ugh
tip: be generous with backslashes! if it is not what you typed, then do not sit there and take it! defend yourself with the slashes!! ! !!)
Lemmy uses markdown, you can choose to learn it instead of getting frustrated about it lol. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Also, why are you putting question marks in the middle of the sentence? Reads horrible.
xml is better than markdown, you will not change my mind, but i would like to see you try
when they were writing the code to convert markdown to xml, because no, sane or insane, web browser supports markdown, did, at no point, did they think "gosh, there's got to be a better way"???
Markdown is for humans who are writing their prose on the fly and don't want to be bothered with the cognitive load associated with the extra verbiage and rulesets of XML.
XML is for computers which are great with verbiage and rulesets.
It's perfectly fine to have a converter between the two to bridge the gap.
that's gotta be ragebait...
forcing a markup language for humans is so therianphobic!!!
and, it is so easy to write xml. markdown is way harder. escaping markdown, you have to remember to put a backslash before every character that markdown deems special, with xml, you just use <, >, and &.
it is both silly and saddening how many harmful stereotypes you've used in such a short span
also, xml is an interchange format, markdown is not!!! using markdown in federated software means that it's going to break!!! you could have the editor use markdown and the federation use xml...
Are you trolling?
now what happened here??? 7 cowards, who are all jeering me, yet are too ashamed to show their face?? show yourselves!!
i love your energy
can you say fuck on the internet??
so was i just hallucinating that lemmy somewhere censored swears??? or can someone back me up on this
You mean "a Lemmy instance"? Maybe