Damn. I use the em dash all the time. LONG before LLMs. Also the Oxford comma, which, apparently, is also an "AI thing". Fuck it. I'mma keep using them, because it's grammatically correct.
this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2026
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Fuck AI
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AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
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The Oxford comma is the most wonderful, amazing, and incredible comma there is. I use it too!
Written language can be confusing without it.
"Please take your children, luggage, pillows and blankets."
Pillows and blankets are together here. This and that. A parenthetical, so to speak.
"Please take your children, luggage, pillows, and blankets"
The pillows and blankets are separate here. This and/or that.
Yes, Oxford commas are not required, but they make the sentence less open to interpretation.
Maybe those were bad examples, but you get it.
Same wavelength. It's just superior imo for exactly the reason you described. It also just 'feels' more well written.
Funnily enough, in my native languages, first version reads more natural, since that's how you write stuff :D
I've heard that from many folks haha language is so interesting to me
Sounds a lot like something AI would be programmed to say.
Actually I'm SI now, not AI, haven't you heard?
Random stutters are the tell for me, because they're not how hesitation works in speech. A real stutter happens on a stressed word or a hard consonant. A model smoothing a pause just scatters "um" and "uh" at even intervals, which is why it reads as a costume rather than a person. The thing they were trying to hide it with gives it away.
It's kind of fascinating that there's a specific AI style of writing which people can recognize now. This is going to be someone's linguistics dissertation.
10000% and that's a dissertation I would want to check out.
But they're trying to mask it. The OpenAI voice model added random stutters and breaks in speaking to make it sound more "human" but instead it just sounds like a dude high on mushrooms trying to hold a conversation.
Not to mention how moronic it is to make AI less useful just to fool people into thinking it's more than it actually is.
Not a dissertation, but here you go:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing
.... with many clear examples.
I still use the em dash, for precisely your reasons above!
Good! Glad to hear it!!
Yeah, I mean there's some more reasons to accuse someone of using AI. Fro example repetitive stuff that doesn't really say anything meaningful. Or if a post sounds 100% like some Reddit stereotype. Or is copied from another place and slightly rephrased. And ChatGPT has a distinctive way of writing. If you always start with a reaffirmation, then point out there's two sides to each coin and then lose it in some borderline correct, borderline incorrect ramblings... It'll just sound like ChatGPT to me. I can't help it! More often than not it'll turn out it's a bot. But I'm not correct all the time.
Clues like someone saying something interesting, or exceptionally stupid would count more towards the human indicators, to me.
Dunno. I guess we have to put up with it.
For sure I was being a bit silly, but the point remains. Let's wait for this bubble to collapse ala the dotcom bubble. If this shit keeps up after that, then maybe it's time to retire from the internet as we know it. Sounds far-fetched but there's always a breaking point
Hehe, though a point I'd like to add to the discussion: The internet didn't get any better after the dotcom collapse. On the contrary, it kind of got worse... I have a hunch this might be the same. So better prepare, and brace for impact, don't just wait. 😄
True that, it definitely got worse. But a lot of moronic companies also went out of business when people realized the idea behind it was not valuable at all.
Some people are overly obsessed with their AI witch-hunt they’ve committed their entire life to it.
Yeah, it’s good to have an eye for spotting AI generated content, but it’s also so easy to misfire. Just ignore these people.