▲ 6 points
Ask HN: Do AIs reply with numerous em dashes to save money somehow?
Maybe those replies are cheaper to generate at least for some models like those used by ChatGPT?
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I don't know where the recent idea that em dashes are difficult to type came from. MS Word automates turning a hyphen into an em dash as you type in the same way that it converts "teh" into "the" and has done so for as long as I can remember.
I find the whole AI / em dash thing frustrating as I used to used them all the time. They have meaning that hyphens don't. I've now had to stop using them because they are seen as AI generated, and structure my sentences differently as a result.
Same here. I use(d) them forever, but I suppose my whole style is now just... AI.
It's annoying.
No. For hundreds of years authors loved to use the em dash. It was a sign of quality writing. Only very recently has it stopped getting used and only because the - is on the wrong side of the keyboard and it's becoming more a hyphen instead.
When someone uses an em dash, it implies they arent using a normal keyboard; not even dvorak.
Even today it's common in professional writing (high quality articles, published books). I agree though that a typical modern keyboarder is going to use a dash or semicolon instead (if anything).
But MS word automatically converts a '-' to an emdash
But an emdash is incredibly easy to type on a Mac — it's shift+option+minus, or option+minus to type an endash
So maybe the training data has a lot of old English writing and overcoming the model's tendency to use em dashes everywhere with custom instructions would use up more electricity.
It's being speculated it's because of RLHF where the humans are from some place in the world (don't remember which place) there they use emdashes.