Meanwhile, I never even knew what an em-dash was until I started reading about AI. I always just used hyphens in the same way. Now I use em-dashes and everybody thinks I'm AI -- oh the ironing.
this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2026
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
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Yea fr fr bro i be talkin likr i donf spaek engrish anymor jus to prove im human FU K captchas
I have become more lax because everyone makes mistakes and if your first way to win an argument is to point out spelling or grammar mistakes you're starting on the wrong foot.
I have a degree in English language and I'm an editor. I refuse to type like a moron.
bot
Reminds of the SG1 episode where the super advanced aliens turn to humanity for help against a constantly adapting AI scourge because humans are skilled at solving problems in unpredictably stupid but effective ways.
Popular LLM overeliance reminds me of the one episode with that society of people who are all linked to the centralized computer core. The Link™ serves as their instant knowledge database, so they lose the ability to actually remember anything or really think for themselves. And if the Link decides to change something in the database, the people are unaware anything changed. As far as they are aware, the current information in the Link at any given time has always been the truth. If someone who does not use the Link tries to point out that something in the Link is not true or has changed, users of the Link vehemently insist that they must be mistaken, and that the Link is infallible.
Stargate SG-1 S7E5 "Revisions"
You left out the horror of how the machine balanced the books of citizens vs available resources.
I felt that was getting spoilery.
If that sound interesting, I definitely recommend watching that episode. Even if you watch just that one episode without having seen the rest of the series. It works as a standalone story without having to have seen any other episodes.
Asgardians needed humans to think of a stupid plan because they were too smart to.
And it was so stupid, it worked.
And don't forget the ability to propel small lumps of metal real fast instead of energy based weaponry. Our advanced rock throwing was half of what they needed
I also often keave a spelling mistake or two
Edit: How the hell did i reply to this instead of the OP lol
Stupid human
AI will copy the spelling mistakes to seem more human
I just, I comma splice so bad, no one can mistake it for AI, I just can't help myself. I think my ADHD, or something, leads to it, and other grammar issues that I've just never shaken.
It's alright, Mr. Walken. We don't think any less of you for it.
Mr Walken, boldly going where, no man, has gone before.
(In my head I'm hearing Walken give a Shatner impersonation)
Well for what it's worth.....super ADHD here and I absolutely do this too.
But what the fuck? Aren't we supposed to use them as we would use pauses in speech? Did somebody teach me wrong or am I hallucinating that memory.
- This thought brought to you by super ADHD
Yeah I never heard about them being usrd to signify pauses in speech. I'm not a native speaker but I think in general they are used to separate "sentences" (they have a verb and all that shit), interleaving sentences, and lists of items. Ofc there is a lot of nuance, for example, this sentence, and there are cases when commas should be left out (afaik). In my language I would always put a comma before "but" or "because" but in English it seems the words themselves separate the sentences. Anyway, shit is weird, English is very random.
I've come to the conclusion that speech to text has played a significant role in the disappearance of commas. When things are written via speech to text, it almost never had any commas unless they say "comma", and almost no one ever does. From there, I guess people just get used to not seeing commas, and even when they're typing, commas don't cross their mind.
It's a pretty big pet peeve of mine, and I find it super frustrating to text with people who frequently used speech to text.
There is more than one style of writing. Online and in communication, people tend to use conversational writing which would make the comma splices not grammatically incorrect.
In a research paper or something, they would be errors.
I mean, that's totally valid, for most of us, anyway
And what happens when someone thinks you're an AI?
Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Either they ignore you or at worst they falsely accuse you of something you know not to be true, so I genuinely don't see why you should care. This seems completely pointless to me. Yet another example of the ways we try to please people who don't need to be pleased. I'd much rather just have them publicly make a fool of themselves so I can block them and move on.
Responding with nothing but a link in a thread about not putting in any effort into one's responses.. What ever point you're trying to convey there is lost in the irony.
I mean its true they could have offed more context; but the link is a short read. To summarize: the author believes llm writing to be of poor quality and when he notices it on linkedin he stops reading; he suspects that other people do this too. Making the argument that if you want people to listen to you or take you seriously you shouldn’t use LLMs to write your posts.
I think both of your perspectives are valid. Yours deals with the overt consequences: “you’re a bot” should be met with indifference and blocking of those people. Thats fair, be true to yourself.
However I think it is a valid aim when talking to other people to wish to convince them of things, or to not be put in a bucket with slop.
However, I’m not sure how effective not using em dashes or having some spelling errors will be in the ling run.
Already if you ask an llm not to do the things that it stereotypically does you can make it harder to detect. You could always add a static layer that intercepts the llms output and stochastically introduces spelling errors. So for now it’s mostly, amusingly, a human social convention due to lack of specificity in prompting.
So we need more IRL community; and social spaces online must to a certain extent become smaller and be reflections of those IRL communities, if we want to have genuine human connection in the long run.
It could be as simple as a meetup in your local area so you can create a graph of “known good humans”.
This doesn’t prevent accounts from being hijacked; but if recurring, meetings, could weed out the vast majority of bots. Takes effort though and a rekindling of the atrophied social constructs for IRL gatherings. Some portion of people may simply opt out for personal preference, and thats ok.
I read the text behind the link - I just didn't engage with it.
What's worth keeping in mind here is that using an LLM to assist in writing could mean anything from it fixing a few spelling mistakes and adding missing punctuation to a text the author wrote themselves all the way to AI writing the entire thing from scratch. Just because someone spots an em dash doesn't mean an LLM wrote the whole thing.
I don't think LLMs are the issue but poor quality writing is. Generic AI output tends to just make people's eyes glaze over so they stop reading. The same thing happens with poorly written human slop. People are only against AI use when they can detect it. It's the good old toupee fallacy: all toupees look bad - except the ones you didn't recognize as a toupee.
Same, but also I've noticed that all those years at university of, "Not typing like you speak," isnt helpful online. I know it makes me look like a robot. Even just using a higher level vocabulary is sus.
I'd rather be who I am than let all this bullshit force me to play dumb. I earned my ability to speak (somewhat) intelligently, and I'm not going to let the AI bros discredit that effort. I, for one, refuse to contribute to the Idiocracy outcome the control freaks want.
For me it depends on the context. I love words, and it's a mathematical fact that there are more long words than short ones, and I love using all of them. But, I also love communicating with people, and if I can use a word that most people know instead of a word most people don't know and it works well enough, I prefer to simplify. I have a tendency to indulge my own vocabulary and I think consciously minding it makes me a better communicator.
There's some fine nuance to finding that balance, though. If the word I want to use is less well-known, but better fits what I'm trying to say (or is significantly shorter than "going the long way around"), then I'm more likely to use it. I think most everybody should strive to communicate as clearly as possible, and that may entail learning the occasional new word. Intentionally "talking down" can be insulting, as well as a step towards Idiocracy if we all start doing it together.
I get that it's appropriate in certain situations, or for certain audiences, but I try to stretch my brain to keep it learning (and therefore more sharp), and I hope most others strive to better their communication skills as well. IMHO it's necessary both to succeed, and to evolve.
Yeah, I think of it kind of like protocol negotiation. If I speak a technical protocol my conversation partner doesn't, my options are either to get them using my protocol, I switch to a common protocol, or we don't speak. Sometimes, if the topic is important enough, the first and third options are preferable. Other times, particularly in casual conversation, I opt for the second one. I still try to be precise, and that can mean an occasional specialty word and accompanying definition, but it's costly to the conversation and if I'm not careful I can get bogged down in explaining minutia instead of getting to my point. Maybe it's more like treating new concepts economically rather than treating jargon as a discrete protocol, though I tend to think of jargons as protocols, you can kind of add them into a common protocol a la carte. They're just computationally expensive for people absorbing them if they're also trying to follow a conversational thread at the same time, and too many can blow the budget and cause people to tap out, so I try to add only the ones I really need.
Interesting analogy. Basically, yeah - you've got to tailor how you speak to the specific topic, participants, and goals you have for what you're trying to convey. There's no overriding universal truth, and adaptability certainly makes for a good communicator.
Paragraphs help. Please, for the sanity of your readers use paragraphs (appropriately).
I've gotten critiques that I write in walls of text, occasionally, but that just looks like a single normally-sized paragraph to me. Maybe I'm just old. I am using a desktop browser on a 4k monitor, so maybe that has something to do with it. Just eyeballing it it looks like several mobile screens worth of text, maybe it should be broken up for mobile viewers. I guess there's a paragraph break for the last two sentences... but it's seven sentences total. Is that too much for one paragraph?
I fix comments even if edited comments are looked upon less favourably. I refuse to use autocorrect so I suffer the consequences of that choice while using a touchscreen keyboard. I just felt one day I might be damaging my literacy skills relying on autocorrect.
Unfortunately that's combined with a weed habit so I also have a bad habit of editing in stuff I didn't think about* (see it just happened again) until 3 minutes later. You can probably track when I'm high with strings of edited comments all in a row 😅
Fuck that.
"Edited at ..." is the major sign of redemption.
The internet is a place where humans can let there hair down.
We must keep these strategies to ourselves! The bots will adapt.
I think English will change in a way that being “wrong” will be part of the language itself.
AI can learn a language, but can’t learn the unpredictability of communities shaped by memes. AI for example doesn’t know memes, because requires processes unable to be emulated via pure logic.
Bad news: clankers occasionally throw in a typo or two as well. Can't tell you whether that's intentional or because the (human made) training data includes typos but there it is.
I understand what you're saying, but I've never heard that use of the word "clankers" before. Is this a thing now?
It's a slur, basically, for AI that pretends to speak like a human. In the Star Wars franchise, people who don't like droids call them that.
My observations: it can be for both reasons, though I think most modern ones will be better than the human average unless you ask them to add typos. Which they can do, but they have a hard time being consistent with it, especially if they're trying to pose as the same person over multiple responses (e.g. a reddit or fedi bot), they won't have the same type and frequency of typos that a human would have consistently across posts.
Any mistakes that show up in what I write are honest mistakes. I make an effort.
I've used two hyphens as an en-dash for many years. As a graphic designer I had a macro that converted two hyphens to an en-dash, and three hyphens to an em-dash. I've noticed that I need to escape the hyphens for them to not be converted to a single hyphen--so, that's what I do.
I don't want to use actual en (–) and em-dashes (—), because they are associated with AI now.
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100% of my lemmy takes place from my phone. I make typos all of the time, but unless I just grammatically fucked up, my message is understandable. Sometimes I'll correct things, but usually I don't bother reading back through to check. If my message is interpretable, that's really all that matters.
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