Well, this is the first time I’ve been accused of writing using an LLM. Should I be flattered?
I suppose I should have expected this to happen eventually, considering that I’ve stubbornly refused to give up the use of the em-dash. I used to type it as a double hyphen (–), but in recent years, I discovered that I could access the single-character version by using Win+; to bring up the emoji/symbols menu, so I switched to doing that to save characters. Perhaps to my detriment.
However, regarding your accusation about quotation marks, let me invite you to try this: Use Ctrl+F on this page (hit it twice to get past the site’s built-in search function) and search for the quotation mark character in people’s replies.
Notice anything?
Yeah… they ALL look like that. Including here, in a message from sypern, who has always been strongly anti-AI (not just in this topic), and whose message was quite short and omitted the use of caps in some cases. Not exactly the kind of reply you’d expect from an LLM.
This is what their reply looks like on my screen, complete with the “weird” quotation marks:
So yeah. That’s fascinating. I didn’t know the forum did that. Learn something new every day.
As for me, I like to yap. Sometimes I get long-winded too. Sorry. If you need a sample of my writing from before the rise of LLMs, here are a couple somewhat-meaty posts I made on this site in bygone years.
EDIT: Oh, and would you look at that. The forum AUTOMATICALLY converted my attempt at a double-hyphen into a dash (maybe an en-dash? I’m not sure). Wonders never cease! Feel free to try it yourself.
This is my attempt at a double hyphen: –
And this is me using the Win+; menu to type an em-dash directly: —
EDIT2: Yep, looks like double hyphens get converted into en-dashes. Again, fascinating! But I’m afraid this is just how I write. Sorry.