“Using an Oxford comma is a sign of AI”
bestie boo, let me fill you in on something: if you’re going to take any part of ‘good grammar’ and randomly assign it to
She’s A Witch!AI, you might as well give up. It’s over. You’re cooked. Anyone who has spent the last decade or more learning to type properly, anyone who has spent any time writing articles/papers/essays that require you to use 'good grammar’ is going to fall into that 'oh no it might be AI’ trap.Stop hunting like it’s 1692. You’re not going to find Goody Proctor at the ChatGPT sacrament. What you’re going to do is exactly what happened back then: harming people who’ve done nothing wrong.
can I reblog this a million times
And using – or — : It means someone used PowerToys on Windows or is on a Mac where double tapping - just turns it into –.
Or is running Grammarly, LanguageTools or some other spell check and grammar assist, which will run your text through a style guide and suggest Oxford commas, curly quotes, and em-dashes.
In the 90s the British police were told that if someone owned candles they were probably into devil worship.
It’s bullshit: Most households have candles for decoration, ambience or power cuts (This was before LED lights could run for like 40 hours. Flashlights had incandescent bulbs and you’d get an hour or two).
What it actually was, apart form a spectacularly dopey bit of advice from some wannabe witch hunter, was a way to arrest someone on suspicion of something they couldn’t disprove by having 'evidence’ so generic that everyone was guilty.
It’s a fig leaf: It’s an excuse to flag someone’s work as fake and take it down or discredit them. It’s a way to claim someone was at the devils sacrament without being asked “Well why were you there?”.
Funny story about my writing:
I started regularly typing on a computer in the late 90s/early 00s, when programs like Word had already started doing things like automatically formatting punctuation. Turning double hyphens into long dashes; quotes into smart quotes; any three consecutive periods into an ellipsis character (which was just three periods but narrower and counted as a single character. For some reason.)
At first, when I didn’t have an Internet connection and used the computer only to write things I was gonna print directly from Word (like school essays to hand physically to the teacher, that’s how it was done back then) ….this wasn’t much of a problem.
But. First year of college, first Internet connection… one of the first things I did was find out about online fanfiction groups. Which then were mostly newsgroups, which could take the form of email lists or feeds on a newsreader, but also could be accessed on a website, like Yahoogroups.
And I started writing stuff.
And it turned out, if you are pasting fanfic into the text field of an email or a Yahoogroups post… You do not want to write that fanfic in a word processing program like Microsoft Word.
Because even as early as 1999 or 2000, the automatic formatting bullshit would NOT survive the transition.
My usual experience was: When pasted into a post, the autoformatted ellipsis would change into a single period… the autoformatted long dash would turn into a shorter dash that (in the Yahoogroups font) was practically indistinguishable from a single hyphen… and various other autoformatted characters would turn into assorted illegible gibberish.
All of which severely harmed the reading experience, I can tell you.
So, at the time, good writers of fanfic had to learn habits very different from what was considered good punctuation elsewhere.
First, if typing a draft to paste into the group, we had to start in plain text. If you couldn’t get a .doc file to stop autoformatting stuff, you had to do a .txt file. Since italics and bold and underline wouldn’t translate, we did a lot of *asterisks for emphasis.* And quotes had to be plain quotes; ellipses had to be actual series of three periods; em-dashes had to be double hyphens, and you had to make sure your writing program was NOT sneakily changing that.
And these writing quirks have stayed with me. Along with a few other formatting-influenced adaptations. For instance, my habit is still to put a space after every double-hyphen, because 1. it was a way to stop the word processor from autoformatting it, and 2. even if it wasn’t autoformatted, Yahoogroups would treat dashes between words like letters in the middle of one long word, and so it wouldn’t do a line break at the dash, and you’d end up with the entire thing carried over onto the next line, leaving a big blank space before it. A post-dash space was the only way to stop this.
But, crucially: all this is not considered normal.
These writing quirks, for the entire two decades or so since I developed them, have been officially considered mistakes in professional settings.
When writing anything official, any document that is required to adhere to style manual guidelines, I have to fix my weird double-hyphens with a space after them. I have to let them get formatted into the stupid em-dash-character. By normal human standards, going back decades, they are wrong.
The previous post is correct about the “signs of AI” being mainly just things that are common and standard for good writing. And yes, I suspect it’s often used like the candles in witch hunts, or the building code violations that are in literally every building but only get pointed out when someone wants an excuse to tear the building down.
I have no idea what they even gave the AI-detector model to train on as its examples of “real human writing,” if any. Definitely not the mainstream writers of any era. Does the thing have a control group at all? Or just a database of “AI examples” and the ability to see similarities to those? If you pass its human test, does that just mean you manage to write so weirdly that no other person’s writing looks like yours, not even the ones that AI writing software got trained on originally?
I don’t know if my writing would pass. I don’t intend to find out. Fuck that.