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My teenager recently asked me why I write like a chatbot, apparently unaware that some human beings prefer to write in complete sentences with attention to details like spelling, punctuation, grammar, and capitalization, and that LLMs were trained on this sort of writing.

This makes me think of the fad where people on youtube will hold a microphone up in frame, because it somehow connotes authenticity. I'm sure some people are already embracing a bit of sloppiness in their writing as a signal of humanity; I'm equally sure that future chatbots will learn to do the same.

> default to pretty good punctuation, spelling and grammar

If leaving out the Oxford comma here was an intentional joke I both commend and curse you!

You're absolutely right! I kid. I'm also a former avid user of the em-dash, but have mostly stopped using it. I've even started replacing em-dash usage with commas, which often results in a slightly awkward, perhaps incorrect, but quaintly artisanal sentence with a LaCroix-like spritz of authenticity.

My double-space-after-a-period though, I will keep that until the end. Even if it often doesn't even render in HTML output, I feel a nostalgic connection to my 1993 high school typing teacher's insistence that a sentence must be allowed to breathe.

Have the same problem but with bullet points, which I learned to type years ago and have used on HN for a long time:

• Like

• This

(option-8 on a Mac US keyboard layout). Now it looks like something only an LLM would do.

Ex-academic here. I too use/tended to use em-dashes quite a bit. It's easy to compose in Linux (Gnome) with a real keyboard: Ctrl Shift U 2014 is ingrained in my head from using them all the time in my academic work.

Were you using them as a replacement for a comma--without spaces on both sides of the em-dash--like how I did just now? If no, you are safe from being mistaken for an LLM program. Honestly, while it is a legitimate punctuation rule, I've never seen a human on the internet to write like that. But LLMs do it constantly, whenever they generate long enough sentences.

How dire the literacy crisis, that chatbots are their only exposure to composition.

I also used em-dash before LLMs, though I would not call myself a typography geek. But yesterday I wrote a birthday message to someone and replaced my em-dashes with minus signs, because I did not want them to think that my message is LLM generated..

I do agree... I sometimes use worse grammar (like that ellipses) and leave in typos just so my comments feel more "real" now.

> Now someone may search old posts without a time cutoff and assume I'm an LLM.

I use em dashes, and I don't care whether or not someone assumes I'm an LLM. Typography exists for a reason.

When every breath is a Turing test, AmIBotOrNot?

I’m waiting for a Philip K. Dick bot to declare me non-human.

Am I the only one who in a Captcha test sometimes wants a different option for the “I am Human” check box? Ironically really since to prove we’re human we have to check the boxes with a crossing in them, no account to be made of people who call them zebra crossings.

Fwiw your comment has lots of human tells and doesn't seem AI generated at all.

My rage–induced habit of ignoring typos caused by the iPhone autocorrect and general abuse of English is suddenly authentic and not lazy and slightly obnoxious (ok maybe it's still those things too)

>I put the em dash on modifier+dash

This is the default on Macs

I'm also increasingly aware that my own writing style and punctuation seem to line up with what might be associated with an AI, but some of the tells (em-dashes, spaces after periods, etc) seem like artifacts of when in history we learned to write.

I wonder how much crossover there would be between a trained text analysis model looking for Gen-X authors and another looking for LLM's.

It really is unfortunate that such a fun piece of punctuation has been effectively gutted. This isn't even really limited to just the em-dash, but I don't know if there's another example of a corporation (or set of them) having such a massive impact on grammar and writing as OpenAI and their ilk have.

Entire sentence structures have been effectively blacklisted from use. It's repulsive.

I have consistently used em-dashes, either in the form of alt+- on MacOS, or in the form of `--` in LaTeX (or `---`), for the last 30 odd years.

Now I find myself deliberately making things worse to avoid being accused of not being human! Bah!

I do a similar thing — also with AHK! — and I don’t intend to stop. I think probably the AI/LLM bubble will pop before I consider changing my habits there.

Tip: Patterns like “It’s not just X, it’s Y” are a more telltale sign of LLM slop. I assume they probably trained on too much marketing blurb at some point and now it’s stuck.

Exactly what an LLM would say, haha.

I use “-“ because I thought the amount of parentheticals I was using was a bit unhinged. In these times of TLDR, I sometimes move the aside to the bottom as an afterthought instead of leaving it inline.

I dunno this en versus em dash stuff, I just use the minus sign on my keyboard.

Nice try

ChatGPT evolves, everything grows. In AI speech, tells abound. Comma, emphasis. A new way, a better way.

I also used — and "proper" quotes which macOS/iOS puts in for you anyway

I also like …

This is like ruining swastikas and loading rainbows

I used to do that too… even using the ellipses character instead of three dots. But on the other hand I'm not a native English speaker and have poor spelling (i.e. words pass spell check, but are incorrect).

That's one of the signals I use to detect if YouTube videos are AI slop. If it's narrated by a non-native speaker, it's much more likely to be high quality. If it's narrated by a British voice with a deep timber, it's 100% AI.

Actually building full, real AI app project code across simple API data tools helps built model agents answer an interesting tool — an agent.

Worth pointing out that calculating p-values on a wide set of metrics and selecting for those under $threshold (called p-hacking) is not statistically sound - who cares, we are not an academic journal, but a pill of knowledge.

The idea is, since data has a ~1/20 chance of having a p < 0.05, you are bound to get false positives. In academia it's definitely not something you'd do, but I think here it's fine.

@OP have you considered calculating Cohen's effect size? p only tells us that, given the magnitude of the differences and the number of samples, we are "pretty sure" the difference is real. Cohen's `d` tells us how big the difference is on a "standard" scale.

It's funny - some months ago I noticed that I use the word "actually" lot, and started trying to curb it from my writing. Not for any AI-related reason, but because it is almost always a meaningless filler word, and I find that being concise helps get my points across more clearly.

e.g. "The body of the template is parsed, but not actually type-checked until the template is used." -> "but not typechecked until the template is used." The word "actually" here has a pleasant academic tone, but adds no meaning.

The result for "ai" is possibly skewed because it's a far more popular talking point in recent times versus HN's history as a whole.

Thank you marginalia_nu for article and this comment (word stats).

I got similar feeling. I'm new here, but got a feeling that some comments are like bot generated.

Such low p-values are proof that something is going on.

Hipotesis (after your recent word statistics): that some bots are "bumping up" AI related subjects. Maybe some companies using LLM tools want to promote some their products ;)

marginalia_nu respect for your work :)

Having mixed feelings on word "actually" as it is/was one of my favorites. Other stuff like "for instance" and "interestingly" are seem to be getting there too...

You've built an interesting statistic from gathering data across the project. The real answer: ai models and agentic apps make building spam tools more simple than ever. All you actually need is just some trivial api automation code.

I wonder what “moat” would be. I see this word way too much from LLMs.

Can you articulate on the column meanings more? Noob new means nothing to me.

Such data analysis of HN related things are always so fun to read. Thanks for making this!

I have a quick question but can you please tell me by what's the age of "new" accounts in your analysis?

Because, I have been called AI sometimes and that's because of the "age" of my comments sometimes (and I reasonably crash afterwards) but for context, I joined in 2024.

It's 2026 now, Almost gonna be 2 years. So would my account be considered new within your data or not?

Another minor point but "actually"/"real" seems to me have risen in usage over 5 times. All of these words look like the words which would be used to defend AI, I am almost certain that I saw the sentence "Actually, AI hype is real and so on.." definitely once, maybe even more than once.

Now for the word real, I can't say this for certain and please take it with a grain of salt but we gen-z love saying this and I am certain that I have seen comments on reddit which just say "real" and OpenAI/other models definitely treat reddit-data as some sort of gold for what its worth so much so that they have special arrangements with reddit.

So to me, it seems that the data has been poised with "real". I haven't really observed this phenomenon but I will try to take a close look if chatgpt is more likely to say "real" or not.

Fwiw, I asked Chatgpt to "defend the position, AI hype sucks" and it responded with the word "real"/"reality" in total 3 times.

(another side fact but real is so used in Gen-z I personally watch channel shorts sometimes https://www.youtube.com/@litteralyme0/shorts which has thousands of videos atp whose title is only "real", this channel is sort of meme of "ryan gosling literally me" and has its own niche lore with metroman lol)

LLM fatigue is real. It's not just em-dash — it's the overall tone of the writing that clues people in. But if your viewpoints and approach are unique, your typesetting won't raise suspicion of machine-generation, except in the most dull of readers. Just be you and it will be fine.

If you'd like more tips on writing I'd be happy to help.

Just do it anyway—I always have, and always will.

Well, I haven't always—just for maybe 20 years.

That was my reaction when LLMs first started getting "good"

I turned to my friend and said "They've co-opted the structure of effective language!"

> good typographical conventions

Here since 2010 in this account, I use em-dashes.

It's easy—and effective—to type using “Opt Shift -” on a Mac.

Oh yeah, left and right “curly quotes” as well, and the occasional …

> It's so sad

Don’t forget «’» — but ain’t nobody got time for that!

A few more to reclaim typography: https://howtotypeanything.com/alt-codes-on-mac/

I switched to semicolons... They look similar enough in use to string things together. I'm sure AI is coming for those too though, and that will be a grim day because those are my last stand.

People will accuse of all types of stuff, regardless if you use em-dashes or not. The way I write apparently is familiar to some as LLM-jargon they've told me, I'm guessing because I've spewed my views and writings on the internet for decades, the LLMs were trained on the way I write, so actually the LLMs are copying me! And others like me.

But anyways, you can't really control how people see your stuff, if you're human I think the humanness will come through anyways, even if you have some particular structure or happen to use em-dashes sometimes. They're so easy to prompt around anyways, that the real tricky LLM stuff to detect by sense and reading is the stuff where the prompter been trying to sneakily make them more human.

I read a text from the 60s by my grandfather this week and seeing an emdash made the LLM alarm in my head go off... Had to really stop myself before I went all "and you" on him

My thoughts exactly. As somebody who has always loved to use em-dashes and bulleted lists to organize my thoughts, this is heartbreaking.

It's like being named Michael Bolton and watching a singer rise in fame named Michael Bolton.

Why should I change my style?

Funnily enough I've actually started using them a little — it made me realise how much more legible/likable I find them.

(Until a few years ago I probably mostly only saw them in print, and I suppose it just never occurred to me that I liked them in particular vs. just the whole book being professionally typeset generally.)

I mean, LLMs aren’t making people sniff around for typography as though that’s a reliable proxy for humanity.

Em dashes, semicolons, deftly delving. It’s all just so…facile. We might as well tell ourselves we can tell it’s shopped from the pixels, having seen some shops in our day.

I feel the same way. I've used em-dashes in my writing forever, and I was always particular about making sure they were used properly (from a typography standpoint with no surrounding spaces).

But now, I have to be so picky about when I use them, even when I think it's the perfect punctuation mark. I'll often just resort to a single hyphen with spaces around. It's wrong, but it doesn't signal someone to go "AI AI AI!!"

I totally agree. When I use em-dashes in my /family iMessage thread/ I get accused of having used ChatGPT to write my reply—my one-sentence reply about dinner plans. Dear Lord.

LLM adopting conventions (typographical or otherwise) is what they do, right? The idea that anyone should then have to change their behaviour is ridiculous, as is the whole conversation, really.

the destruction of the em-dash is really a shame; and "--" is under suspicion..

I've sometimes taken to using spaced en dashes, which I haven't seen in many AI comments: https://anemato.de/blog/emdash

It’s not even the key combo, iOS and autocorrect will do it for you.

are there really places that a comma, super-comma; or (parenthesis) dont work roughly as well? I find the em-dash mildly abhorrent, even before this all.

You're absolutely right. Not being able to communicate in your own unique style is not just sad, it is incredibly frustrating.

> I'm still salty that I can't use em-dashes anymore for fear of my writing being flagged as AI generated.

I've typeset books (back in the QuarkXPress days, before Adobe's InDesign ruled the typesetting world) and never bothered with em-dashes. Writing online is, to me, a subset of ASCII. YMMW.

But the one thing I don't understand is this: how comes people using LLM outputs are so fucking dumb as to not be able to pass it through a filter (which could even be another LLM prompt) that just says: "remove em-dashes, don't use emojis, don't look like a dumb fuck".

Why oh why are those lazy assholes who ruin our world so dumb that they can't even fix that?

It's facepalming.

Em-dashes are a bit too conversational for formal prose, so they have always been looked down on aside from usage by AI.

If you change to

> select user, source, count(*), ...

it's clear that every single outlier in em-dash use in the data set is a green account.

I still call voodoo on this. I use an iPhone, iPad, Mac to comment here—all of them autocorrect to em dashes at one point or another. Same goes for ellipsis.

apparently HN comments are licensed not only to HN, but also to some guy in sweden

cool cool cool

great repo name!

Another option instead of using identity is to use proof of work or hashcash such that anyone who thinks a comment is valuable can use some hash rate to upvote it. It doesn't matter how the content was generated, only that someone thought it was important, and you can independently verify this by checking how much hash effort went into hashing for that comment. This also does not require any identity either.

> Requiring proof of identity is the only solution I can think of, despite how unappealing it is

Same. I agree that it is unappealing but it can be done in a way that respects anonymity.

I built this and talk about it here: https://blog.picheta.me/post/the-future-of-social-media-is-h...

I think we’re on the precipice of this being a requirement to have any faith you’re talking to another human. As a side effect it also helps avoid state actors from influencing others.

Removing anonymity is not a solution, just a different problem.

invitation only is a reasonably successful alternative for niche communities, especially with the ability to banish an invite "tree".

I don't feel like using HN anymore, I hope the just add invites, last time I said this someone replied it's just the same as some other site then, but it's not... hn is hn...this situation is really bumming me out.

I don't think that's true at all.

One of the things HN does is not let you interact in certain ways until you've earned sufficient karma. This is a basic proof-of-work. If your bot can't average a positive karma, then it'll never get certain privileges.

Not to say the system is perfectly tuned for bots, because it's not. The point is that proof of identity is not the only option.

invitation tree. lobste.rs already has it, works great.

The user [1] you've mentioned has 160 points being a poster of total four bland messages. This goes against a normal statistical distribution. And this gives away why they do it: the long-term aim is to cultivate voting rings to influence the narratives and rankings in the future. For now, this is only my theory but it may be a real monetization strategy for them.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=snowhale

"is real" is another big red flag, go search this in comments. There appear to be at least three accounts posting direct LLM outputs.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

I've certainly noticed the summary posts.

I'll actually post a comment or question and I'll get a reply with a bit of a paragraph of what feels like a very "off" (not 'wrong' but strangely vague) summary of the topic ... and then maybe an observation or pointed agenda to push, but almost strangely disconnected from what I said.

One of the challenges is that yeah regular users don't get each other's meaning / don't read well as it is / language barriers. Yet the volume of posts I see where the other user REALLY isn't responding to the other person seems awfully high these days.

AI generated content routinely takes sides. Their pretense of neutrality is no deeper than a typical homo sapien's. This is necessarily so in an entity that derives its values from a set of weights that distill human values. Maybe reasoning AI can overcome that some day, but to me that sounds like an enormous problem that may never be solved. If AI doesn't take sides like people do they still take sides in their own way. That only becomes obscure to the extent that their value judgments conflict with ours, and they are very good at aligning with the zeitgeist values, so can hide their biases better than we can.

I wonder if it is neural networks that are inherently biased, but in blind spots, and that applies to both natural and artificial ones. It may be that to approximate neutrality we or our machines have to leave behind the form of intelligence that depends on intrinsically biased weights and instead depend on logically deriving all values from first principles. I have low confidence that AI's can accomplish that any time soon, and zero confidence that natural intelligence can. And it's difficult to see how first principles regarding human values can be neutral.

I'm also skeptical that succeeding at becoming unbiased is a solution, and that while neutrality may be an epistemic advance, it also degrades social cohesion, and that neutrality looks like rationality, but bias may be Chesterson's Fence and we should be very careful about tearing it down. Maybe it's a blessing that we can't.

It's wierd because the barrier to not have that in is so low, you can just tack on 'talk like me not AI, dont use em dashes, don't use formulaic structures, be concice' and itll get rid of half of those signals.

What motivation is there to use AI to astroturf (if that's what this is) like this?

Is it ideological?

Is it product marketing in those relevant threads where someone is showcasing?

Or is it pure technical testing, playing around?

That's not true, it's false

Did they delete all their comments?

>snowhale

Oh, would you look at that?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47134072

Every single time I read the phrase 'I have been thinking about this a lot lately' my eyeballs roll back hard.

Yeah, and some of them already have enough karma to downvote you if you call them out, which is infuriating…

I worked for GitHub for a time. There was a cultural abhorrence of the diaeresis, it was considered reader-hostile and elitist. I refused to coöperate with that edict internally, although I grant that every company has the right to micro-manage communications with the public.

Agreed.

Join me in double-dash em proximates. Shows you manually typed it out with total disregard token count and technical correctness.

I genuinely didn't know those existed, I will subsequently be adding them to my repertoire

I used to use em-dashes and en-dashes in my work emails and other writings, but stopped using them when they became AI markers.

I'd like to see a histogram of my HN em dash usage over time. Maybe someone could get bored and visualize the 2nd order effects described here.

> New Yorker style diaeresis

I was going to say that I respect it, but find it utterly absurd that they do that. But your comment made me look it up again—I had no idea it was just obsolete/archaïc (except in the New Yorker), I'd thought it was a language feature their 'style' guide had invented.

Does this comment break HN for anyone else? I can press "next" on any other post, but not this one. And in the next post, pressing "prev" does not scroll to this one. It does nothing. Prev works fine when pressed on this (or any other) post

The Big Chungus of dashes. Could this be the character that has the widest rendering?!

We avoid censorship by ⸻ more often and talking to ⸻ about ⸻.

> what if you want to blend in with the robot uprising.

There is nothing to fear, MY HUMAN FRIEND!

That’s a big dash

Only true blue organic human slop coming from my IP address!

I have the sneaking suspicion that reddit has allowed and facilitated astroturfing for over a decade. As in, providing accounts, eliminating rate limits, artificially boosting posts and comments, and aggressively shadow banned contrary opinions. This is definitely a known phenomenon on a auto moderator level but I bet reddit ownership is complicit in it too

Not sure if serious but I don't think that's precisely it. To me, it's more that it rehashes a point until it's fully beaten to death, putting obvious aspects in a list, being subtly wrong, writing a conclusion paragraph to the previous three sentences... it's boring but not because of what it writes but, instead, how it writes it. Of course, it can also be inherently uninteresting but then you should have entered a prompt that causes the autocomplete function to ramble about something you're interested in :P

It also feels way too sanitised, like it went through some companies PR department (granted, that's because it went through openais pr department, but still)

> No one wants to read your ChatGPT outputs.

...except ChatGPT fans.

> minute to dash a note

I support this dashing recommendation.

I have sent them an email a few days ago about the state of /noobcomments.

This wasn't really a intended as an "wow, dang is sure sleeping on the job", more than an interesting observation on the new bot ecosystem.

I also feel like there's a missing discussion about the comment quality on HN lately. It feels like it's dropped like crazy. Wanted to see if I could find some hard data to show I haven't gone full Terry Davis.

Is there even an incentive to optimize for such signals, though? Em-dashes have been a known indicator of AI-generated text for a good while, and are still extremely prevalent. While someone who doesn't like AI slop and knows and what to look out for will notice and call out obvious AI comments, the unfortunate truth is that the majority of people simply cannot tell, and even among those who can, many don't care.

Obvious AI-generated posts and articles make it to the front page on a daily basis, and I get the impression that neither the average user nor the moderation team see that as a problem at all anymore.

Not so long ago, they were just a ~75%-odds tell that the user was typing on a Mac.

trying to remember what is the grammatical purpose of it when writing

trying to remember last time I used it

This is probably the time to add some invitation system like GMail had in the beginning. Or make a shade for accounts <1yr. Or something else, before things get too mixed.

I just took a look at /noobcomments and wow, there's ever a comment where a person argues with AI instead of, you know, using their own brain. It was abivous it was ai since it was formatted with markdown

I wanted to point out that em dashes are autocompleted by the iOS keyboard. So the false positives and true negatives might have some overlaps without more details. I think a better indicator would be to only detect em dashes with preceding and following whitespace characters, and general unicode usage of that user.

Additionally, lots of Chinese and Russian keyboard tools use the em dash as well, when they're switching to the alternative (en-US) layout overlay.

There's also the Chinese idiom symbol in UTF8 which gets used as a dot by those users a lot, so that could be a nice indicator for legit human users.

edit: lol @ downvotes. Must have hit a vulnerable spot, huh?

> HN has gotten absolutely innundated with bots last few months.

hm, the whole internet really, youtube, reddit, twitter, facebook, blog posts, food recipes, news articles, it's getting more and more obvious

AI post "improvements" are the most annoying thing. I see more and more people doing it, especially when posting reviews/experiences with things, and they always get called out for it. They always justify it with "AI helped me organize what I wanted to say." Like man, you're having an AI write about an experience it didn't have and likely didn't even proofread it. Who knows what BS it added to the story. Even disorganized and misspelled stories are better than AI fantasy renditions that are 20 times longer than they need to be.

I just assume if any comment sounds like an ad it's a bot. All the comments like "I'm 10x faster with Claude Opus 4.6!" or "Have you tried Codex with ChatGPT 5.X? What a time to be alive!" can be lumped in the bot bin.

> human using AI to 'improve' the quality of their comment

I want to hear people in their own voice, their own ideas, with their own words. I have no interest in reading AI generated comments with the same prose, vocabulary, and grammar.

I don't care if your writing is bad.

Additionally, I am sceptical that using AI to write comments on your behalf creates opportunities for self-improvement. I suspect this is all leading to a death of diversity in writing where comments increasingly have an aura of sameness.

I don't personally care about the distinction especially since AI usually 'improves' things by making it more verbose. Don't waste tokens to force me to read more useless words about your position - just state it plainly.

Brevity is the soul of wit.

If you are suspicious, look at comment history. It's usually fairly obvious because all comments made by LLM spambots look the same, have very similar structure and length. Skim ten of them and it becomes pretty clear if the account is genuine.

I'm more worried about how many people reply to slop and start arguing with it (usually receiving no replies — the slop machine goes to the next thread instead) when they should be flagging and reporting it; this has changed in the last few months.

I was thinking of how to create a UX around quantifying or qualifying AI use. If products revealed that users had used in-app AI to compose their responses, they might respond by doing it outside the app and pasting it in. If you then labeled pasted text as AI they might use tools to imitate typing. And after all that, you might face a user backlash from the users who rely on AI to write.

You can control the major narrative on social media — about anything you want

What we think others around us think has a big effect on our own behavior

the motive is probably more depressing. a normal human who just wants human interaction. people interacting with something "you" wrote just feels nice and people like that stuff.

The goal is likely to be able to astroturf with aged accounts down the line.

I don't think this explains why new accounts use EM-dashes with a 10x higher prevalence than the baseline established by baseline.

I also don't think the first point is correct at all.

Haha, the code counts the number of comments with em-dashes and similar, not the number of em-dashes total.

Could be an argument made for aggregating by user instead however, if some bots are found to be particularly active and skewing the data.

The use of em dashes is a human right. I ask that people not discriminate against em-dash users—we should be a protected class—and I refuse to abandon them. Perhaps I’ll have one engraved on my tombstone. He died doing what he loved—dashing.

Wow what boring AI slop

I'm sure you can't share details but would be cool to hear more about it generally speaking, what worked and not etc. Especially if it involved HN.

Our company is being attacked rn in tech media and at least some of it, gut feeling wise, seems obviously sponsored / promoted by competitors. I know that's not surprising, but never watched it happen from this side before.

I think what a larger sample size would do would be to help capture changes over time. Humans tend to be more active certain times of days, whereas bots don't tend to do that.

I felt it quite a while back (more than 10 years ago), when, in high school, I learnt LaTeX and discovered Beamer. I naturally proceeded to make all of my presentations with it, including the rehearsal for a big competitive French exam. The person reviewing the presentation advised me to dirty it up a bit, otherwise nobody would believe that my father wasn’t a PhD researcher that did the work for me.

That was a bit saddening honestly. I kept the presentation as-is as I didn’t knew how to willfully screw up a Beamer presentation, and I would not touch PowerPoint (fortunately the final jury believed me).

Cheating had always been an issue before LLMs, but now we’re back to the same old tricks: just make sure to add a mistake or two to hide you copied the homework on your neighbor. It’s a shame because I kinda like learning the subtleties of foreign languages, and as a non-native English speaker, it’s quite rewarding when going online!

I think it's just people experimenting with conversational bots. If you can get your bot to participate in a conversation on HN without being identified as a bot then it's better than those that do.

Bots need content from somewhre, they either copy something else or use ai to generate.

The incentives to use bots are many.

People have posted their blogs here before and gotten the HN hug of death plus a few hundred comments. It's 2026 and not 2016; HN is a much larger platform than people seem to think it is and HN has significant eyes to be shifted if your posts reach the front page. And given how cheap it is to throw bots at whatever site has open registration it doesn't surprise me to see manipulation here.

I know on reddit since basically the very beginning there has been a market for accounts with authentic but anodyne histories. It ends up being easier to make them yourself and then just occasionally use them for whatever guerilla marketing, astroturf campaign, or propaganda operation is your actual goal. But still until recently you pretty much had to pay people to sit and post on social media on a bunch of accounts to generate these histories.

This use was one of the first things that occurred to me when LLMs started getting genuinely good at summarizing texts and conversations. And I assume a fair bit of this has always happened on HN too. I've never moderated here obviously so I have no first hand insight but the social conventions here are uniquely ripe for it and it has a disproportionate influence on society through the dominance of the tech industry, making it a good target.

Getting stories on the front page of HN can get them spread across the entire media. Also, you end up with a bunch of accounts that can upvote comments/posts that you're pushing and downvote/flag the ones that criticize them.

Lots of dumb blogs from unknowns about vibecoding entire products in a weekend using specific AI slop generators from new startups that are getting to the front page lately.

remember: 1) those accounts that are causing 10x as many em-dashes are the dumb AI accounts. The smart ones are at the least filtering obvious tells from the output. They might even outnumber the dumb ones.

2) Also, a lot of people are real, but using AI to make themselves sound smarter. It's not necessarily completely nefarious.

Using em-dashes as an estimate has to result in a bunch of undercounting and overcounting.

Listen, I fully support your right to buy and use whatever you want from Priscilla’s or Adam & Eve. Keep it consensual and not in public view though, okay?

AI use is similar. Ask it to do whatever writing or text wrangling you want, but please show the public the sanitized version.

I think people are now less inclined to use an em dash, because they don’t want to be mistaken for an LLM.

But the em-dash is a different character. I think even those that use a pause would just opt for - on their keyboard, whereas the em-dash — requires additional work on most (all?) keyboard layouts. It's _not_ more work for an AI though hence why it's a tell.

How did you make the character without googling it?

> I just used them to reflect pauses in my speech for tangents - and old habit from my IRC days.

The tell here is that you used a hyphen, not an em-dash.

Yeah, same. I use an extended keyboard layout on my PC. I'm so used to it I have to actively decide against using proper quotes and dashes and whatnot. I don't bother on mobile, though.

Every time someone states they stop reading when they encounter proper typography, I feel attacked.

No fancy keyboard required, just a keystroke on Mac (`alt+shift+-`) and Linux (`right alt+something` depending on your distro).

I learned just right now that this isn't the default. I set my bookmark to HN in like 2011 before making an account, and apparently it's that one. I didn't realize that wasn't just the basic homepage but with a weird address for some reason.

what is `/classic`?

like bang instead of exclamation point? or dot instead of period? I like it.

even though I used to like pointing out the difference between a hyphen and a period.

If you control a bunch of established accounts, you can use them to either shill for products, or upvote certain topics.

- Spam a product/service

- Generate age so spamming a product/service is easier and the account appears more trustworthy

- Influence discussions in a particular direction for monetary gain, i.e. "I got rich on bitcoin, you'd be crazy not to invest".

- Influence discussions in a particular direction for political gain, i.e. "I went to Xinjiang and the Uyghurs couldn't be happier!"

Paid actors, regular people and primitive bots are already doing so plentifully and successfully.

Of course, all of the above can be replaced by AI, but it would not significantly alter the status quo.

Karma aside, flooding the comments with a chosen narrative via army of bots seems like it's already happening. I suppose the bots can also do voting rings, but they don't necessarily need to.

Would be interesting to see "fastest growing accounts in last N months" or something similar. I'm guessing the ones that are actually humans would be closer to the top than the bottom, but maybe HN users aren't better than the average person to detect AI or not.

I did on my old account, but dang just banned it because I said my older accounts got banned for opposing AI.

Are you saying new accounts are 10x more likely to be using macs? That would be quite a thesis.

It can crank proof of work schemes to maximum, something like you need to burn 15-20 minutes 16 core cpu to post a single comment. It will be infuriating for users, but not cheap for bots

One solution is to get rid of anonymity online, enforce validation of identity. Every human only gets 1 account. And then we still ban people that use AI. Might take a bit but eventually we'll have filtered out all the grifters.

If that's worth the cost... probably not?

Taking back the emdash — fight the power.

> How many of those are bots and how many of those are "fuck you, clankers" humans—like me?

Maybe the em dash is the self censorship/deletion mechanism that we've all been waiting for. Better than having to write pill subscription ads, I suppose.