I’m spending way too much time on the RealOrAI subreddits these days. I think it scares me because I get so many wrong, so I keep watching more, hoping to improve my detection skills. I may have to accept that this is just the new reality - never quite knowing the truth.

As they say, the demand for racism far outstrips the supply. It's hard to spend all day outraged if you rely on reality to supply enough fodder.

a reliable giveaway for AI generated videos is just a quick glance at the account's post history—the videos will look frequent, repetitive, and lack a consistent subject/background—and that's not something that'll go away when AI videos get better

The problem’s gonna be when Google as well is plastered with fake news articles about the same thing. There’s very little to no way you will know whether something is real or not.

I really wish Google will flag videos with any AI content, that they detect.

I find the sound is a dead giveaway for most AI videos — the voices all sound like a low bitrate MP3.

Which will eventually get worked around and can easily be masked by just having a backing track.

You don't need AI for that.

https://youtu.be/xiYZ__Ww02c

Next step: find out whether Youtube will remove it if you point it out

Answer? Probably "of course not"

They're too busy demonetizing videos, aggressively copyright striking things, or promoting Shorts, presumably

Synth id can be removed, run it through an image 2 image model with a reasonably high denoising value or add artificial noise and use another model to denoise and voila. It's effort that probably most aren't doing, but TKS certainly possible.

I just went to a random OpenAI blog post ("The new ChatGPT Images is here"), right-click saved one of the images (the one from "Text rendering" section), and pasted it to your [1] link - no metadata.

I know the metadata is probably easy to strip, maybe even accidentally, but their own promotional content not having it doesn't inspire confidence.

It is so irritating that people now think you've used an LLM just because you use nice typography. I've been using en dashes a ton (and em dashes sporadically) since long before ChatGPT came around. My writing style belonged to me first—why should I have to change?

If you have the Compose key [1] enabled on your computer, the keyboard sequence is pretty easy: `Compose - - -` (and for en dash, it's `Compose - - .`). Those two are probably my most-used Compose combos.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key

I would add that a lot of us who were born or grew up in the UK are quite comfortable saying stuff like "you're right, but...", or even "I agree with you, but...". The British politeness thing, presumably.

Just my two cents: We use em-dashes in our bookstore newsletter. It's more visually appealing than than semi-colons and more versatile as it can be used to block off both ends of a clause. I even use en-dashes between numbers in a range though, so I may be an outlier.

Well the dialogue there involves two or more people, when commenting, why would you use that.. Even if you have collaborators, you wouldn't very likely be discussing stuff through code comments..

Em-dashes may be hard to type on a laptop, but they're extremely easy to type on iOS—you just hold down the "-" key, as with many other special characters—so I use them fairly frequently when typing on that platform.

Also, I've seen people edit, one-by-one, each m-dash. And then they copy-paste the entire LLM output, thinking it looks less AI-like or something.

As a brit I'd say we tend to use "en-dashes", slightly shorter versions - so more similar to a hyphen and so often typed like that - with spaces either side.

I never saw em-dashes—the longer version with no space—outside of published books and now AI.

I'm pretty sure the OP is talking about this thread. I have it top of mind because I participated and was extremely frustrated about, not just the AI slop, but how much the author claimed not to use AI when they obviously used it.

You can read it yourself if you'd like: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46589386

It was not just the em dashes and the "absolutely right!" It was everything together, including the robotic clarifying question at the end of their comments.

You’re absolutely right—lots of very smart people use em dashes. Thank you for correcting me on that!

> the former type is all but obliterated now.

Discord is the 9,000lb gorilla of this form of social media, and it's actually quietly one of the largest social platforms on the internet. There's clearly a desire for these kinds of spaces, and Discord seems to be filling it.

While it stinks that it is controlled by one big company, it's quite nice that its communities are invite-only by default and largely moderated by actual flesh-and-blood users. There's no single public shared social space, which means there's no one shared social feed to get hooked on.

Pretty much all of my former IRC/Forum buddies have migrated to Discord, and when the site goes south (not if, it's going to go public eventually, we all know how this story plays out), we expect that we'll be using an alternative that is shaped very much like it, such as Matrix.

> "internet based medium for socializing with people you know IRL"

"Social media" never meant that. We've forgotten already, but the original term was "social network" and the way sites worked back then is that everyone was contributing more or less original content. It would then be shared automatically to your network of friends. It was like texting but automatically broadcast to your contact list.

Then Facebook and others pivoted towards "resharing" content and it became less "what are my friends doing" and more "I want to watch random media" and your friends sharing it just became an input into the popularity algorithm. At that point, it became "social media".

HN is neither since there's no way to friend people or broadcast comments. It's just a forum where most threads are links, like Reddit.

It's even worse than that, TikTok & Instagram are labeled "social media" despite, I'd wager, most users never actually posting anything anymore. Nobody really socializes on short form video platforms any more than they do YouTube. It's just media. At least forums are social, sort of.

I'll come clean and say I've still never tried Discord and I feel like I must not be understanding the concept. It really looks like it's IRC but hosted by some commercial company and requiring their client to use and with extremely tenuous privacy guarantees. I figure I must be missing something because I can't understand why that's so popular when IRC is still there.

The social networks have all added public media and algorithms. I read explanation that because friends don't produce enough content to keep engaged so they added public feeds. I'm disappointed that there isn't a private Bluesky/Mastodon. I also want an algorithm that shows the best of what following posted since last checked so I can keep up.

You know Meta, the "social media company" came out and said their users spend less than 10% of the time interacting with people they actually know?

"Social Media" had become a euphemism for 'scrolling entertainment, ragebait and cats' and has nothing to do 'being social'. There is NO difference between modern reddit and facebook in that sense. (Less than 5% of users are on old.reddit, the majority is subject to the algorithm.)

>incentives

spot on. The number of times I've came across a poorly made video where half the comments are calling out its inaccuracies. In the end Youtube (or any other platform) and the creator get paid. Any kind of negative interaction with the video either counts as engagement or just means move on to the next whack-a-mole variant.

None of these big tech platforms that involve UGC were ever meant to scale. They are beyond accountable.

Exactly. People spend less time thinking about the underlying structure at play here. Scratch enough at the surface and the problem is always the ads model of internet. Until that is broken or is economically pointless the existing problem will persist.

Elon Musk cops a lot for the degradation of twitter to people who care about that sort of thing, and he definitely plays a part there, but its the monetisation aspect that was the real tilt to all noise in a signal to noise ratio perspective

We've taken a version of the problem in the physical world to the digital world. It runs along the same lines of how high rents (commercial or residential) limit the diversity of people or commercial offering in a place simply because only a certain thing can work or be economically viable. People always want different mixes of things and offering but if the structure (in this case rent) only permits one type of thing then that's all you're going to get

I think incentives is the right way to think about it. Authentic interactions are not monetized. So where are people writing online without expecting payment?

Blogs can have ads, but blogs with RSS feeds are a safer bet as it's hard to monetize an RSS feed. Blogs are a great place to find people who are writing just because they want to write. As I see more AI slop on social media, I spend more time in my feed reader.

The said hypothetical social media, if gaining any traction, will be the heaven for adversarial training.

There are mastodon communities such https://mastodon.art/ where AI is explicitly banned.

in effect, broadly anti-AI communities like bsky succeed by the sheer power of universal hate. Social policing can get you very far without any technology I think

I don't know of any, but my strategy to avoid slop has been to read more long-form content, especially on blogs. When you subscribe over RSS, you've vetted the author as someone who's writing you like, which presumably means they don't post AI slop. If you discover slop, then you unsubscribe. No need for a platform to moderate content for you... as you are in control of the contents of your news feed.

To some degree there’s something like this happening. The old saying “pics or it didn’t happen” used to mean young people needed to take their phones out for everything.

Now any photo can be faked, so the only photos to take are ones that you want yourself for memories.

lol if they don't put the phone down now, then how can AI generated content specifically optimized to get people to stay be any better.

What a nice thought :)

Not a dystopia for me. I’m a cyclist that’s been hit by 3 cars. I believe we will look back at the time when we allowed emotional and easily distracted meat bags behind the wheels of fast moving multiple ton kinetic weapons for what it is: barbarism.

You might like David Mason's short story "Road Stop":

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/61309

The Last of the Winnebagos by Connie Willis

> In x amount of time a significant majority of road traffic will be bots in the drivers seat (figuratively), and a majority of said traffic won't even have a human on-board. It will be deliveries of goods and food.

Nah. That's assuming most cars today, with literal, not figurative, humans are delivering goods and food. But they're not: most cars during traffic hours and by very very very far are just delivering groceries-less people from point A to point B. In the morning: delivering human (usually by said human) to work. Delivering human to school. Delivering human back to home. Delivering human back from school.

I mean maybe someday we'll have the technlogy to work from home too. Clearly we aren't there yet according to the bosses who make us commute. One can dream... one can dream.

Recently I’ve been thinking about the text form of communication, and how it plays with our psychology. In no particular order here’s what I think:

1. Text is a very compressed / low information method of communication.

2. Text inherently has some “authority” and “validity”, because:

3. We’ve grown up to internalize that text is written by a human. Someone spend the effort to think and write down their thoughts, and probably put some effort into making sure what they said is not obviously incorrect.

Intimately this ties into LLMs on text being an easier problem to trick us into thinking that they are intelligent than an AI system in a physical robot that needs to speak and articulate physically. We give it the benefit of the doubt.

I’ve already had some odd phone calls recently where I have a really hard time distinguishing if I’m talking to a robot or a human…

You’re absolutely right, we use that phrase a lot in the UK when we emphatically agree with someone, or we’re being sarcastic.

Thanks for pointing that out, because I hadn't see it getting flagged and I don't think that's fair. Fixed now.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46674621 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46673930 are the top comments and that's about as good as HN gets.

Article adjacency on HN typically lasts less than 10 minutes ... you did include an actual link though, so thanks for that.

You are absolutely right is something some people in some variants of English say all the time.

It may grate but to me, it grates less than "correct" which is a major sign of arrogant "I decide what is right or wrong" and when I hear it, outside of a context where somebody is the arbiter or teacher, I switch off.

But you're absolutely wrong about youre absolutely right.

It's a bit hokey, but it's not a machine made signifier.

That I'm a real human being that is stupid in English sometimes? :)

The funny thing is I knew people that used the phrase 'you're absolutely right' very commonly...

They were sales people, and part of the pitch was getting the buyer to come to a particular idea "all on their own" then make them feel good on how smart they were.

The other funny thing on EM dashes is there are a number of HN'ers that use them, and I've seen them called bots. But when you dig deep in their posts they've had EM dashes 10 years back... Unless they are way ahead of the game in LLMs, it's a safe bet they are human.

These phrases came from somewhere, and when you look at large enough populations you're going to find people that just naturally align with how LLMs also talk.

This said, when the number of people that talk like that become too high, then the statistical likelihood they are all human drops considerably.

Those are hyphens.

I don't have strong negative feelings about the era of LLM writing, but I resent that it has taken the em-dash from me. I have long used them as a strong disjunctive pause, stronger than a semicolon. I have gone back to semicolons after many instances of my comments or writing being dismissed as AI.

I will still sometimes use a pair of them for an abrupt appositive that stands out more than commas, as this seems to trigger people's AI radar less?

I can’t be the only one who has ever read https://practicaltypography.com/hyphens-and-dashes.html

I've been left wondering when is the world going to find out about Input Method Editor.

It lets users type all sorts of ‡s, (*´ڡ`●)s, 2026/01/19s, by name, on Windows, Mac, Linux, through pc101, standard dvorak, your custom qmk config, anywhere without much prior knowledge. All it takes is to have a little proto-AI that can range from floppy sizes to at most few hundred MBs in size, rewriting your input somewhere between the physical keyboard and text input API.

If I wanted em–dashes, I can do just that instantly – I'm on Windows and I don't know what are the key combinations. Doesn't matter. I say "emdash" and here be an em-dash. There should be the equivalent to this thing for everybody.

First time I’m hearing about a shortcut for this. I always use 2 hyphens. Is that not considered an em-dash ?

Now I'm actually curious to see statistics regarding the usage of em-dashes on HN before and after AI took over. The data is public, right? I'd do it myself, but unfortunately I'm lazy.

>If no human ever used that phrase, I wonder where the ai's learned it from?

Reinforced with RLHF? People like it when they're told they're right.

There are many phrases that exist solely in fiction.

Discord fills some of the pockets of human interaction. We really need more invite only platforms.

This is the view I mostly subscribe to too. That coupled with more sites going somewhere closer to the something awful forum model whereby there is a relatively arbitrary upfront free that sort of helps with curating a community and added friction to stem bots.

Lets all just get together and go bowling, shall we?

It would be nice to regain those national index sites or yellow page sites full of categories, where one could find what they're looking for only (based) within the country.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. An invite only platform where invites need to be given and received in person. It'll be pseudonymous, which should hopefully help make moderation manageable. It'll be an almost cult-like community, where everyone is a believer in the "cause", and violations can mean exile.

Of course, if (big if) it does end up being large enough, the value of getting an invite will get to a point where a member can sell access.

HN has survived many things but I dont think it will survive the LLMs.

I thought you were going for 2^15-1 and an LLM messed up the math.

Holy based

To extend what 'viccis' said above, the meaning of "social media" has changed and is now basically meaningless because it's been used by enough old media organisations who lack the ability to discern the difference between social media and a forum or a bulletin-board or chat site/app or even just a plain website that allows comments.

Social Media is become the internet and/or vice-versa.

Also, I think you're objectively wrong in this statement:

"the actual function of this website is, which is to promote the views of a small in crowd"

Which I don't think was the actual function of (original) social media either.

It's been really sad to see reddit go like this because it was pretty much the last bastion of the human internet. I hated reddit back in the day but later got into it for that reason. It's why all our web searches turned into "cake recipe reddit." But boy did they throw it in the garbage fast. One of their new features is you can read AI generated questions with AI generated answers. What could the purpose of that possibly be? We still have the old posts... for the most part (a lot of answers were purged during the protest) but what's left of it is also slipping away fast for various reasons. Maybe I'll try to get back into gemini protocol or something.

> Bots have ruined reddit but that is what the owners wanted.

Adding the option to hide profile comments/posts was also a terrible move for several reasons.

> allow even more bots to increase traffic which drives up ad revenue

Isn't that just fraud?

The biggest change reddit made was ignoring subscriptions and just showing anything the algorithm thinks you will like. Resulting in complete no name subreddits showing on your front page. Meaning moderators no longer control content for quality, which is both a good and bad thing, but it means more garbage makes it to your front page.

Wouldn’t taking the API away hurt the bots?

I’m think you are overestimating humanity.

At the moment I am on a personal finance kick. Once in awhile I find myself in the bogleheads Reddit. If you don’t know bogleheads have a cult-like worship of the founder of vanguard, whose advice, shockingly, is to buy index funds and never sell.

Most of it is people arguing about VOO vs VTI vs VT. (lol) But people come in with their crazy scenarios, which are all varied too much to be a bot, although the answer could easily be given by one!

> So they allow even more bots to increase traffic which drives up ad revenue

When are people who buy ads going to realize that the majority of their online ad spend is going towards bots rather than human eye balls who will actually buy their product? I'm very surprised there hasn't been a massive lawsuite against Google, Facebook, Reddit, etc. for misleading and essentially scamming ad buyers

Isn't showing ads to bots...pointless?

Steve Huffman is an awful CEO. With that being said I've always been curious how the rest of the industry (for example, the web-wide practice of autoplaying videos) was constructed to catch up with Facebook's fraudulent metrics. Their IPO (and Zuckerberg is certainly known to lie about things) was possibly fraud and we know that they lied about their own video metrics (to the point it's suspected CollegeHumor shut down because of it)

On a Mac keyboard, Option-Shift-hyphen gives an em-dash. It’s muscle memory now after decades. For the true connoisseurs, Option-hyphen does an en-dash, mostly used for number ranges (e.g. 2000–2022). On iOS, double-hyphens can auto-correct to em-dashes.

I’ve definitely been reducing my day-to-day use of em-dashes the last year due to the negative AI association, but also because I decided I was overusing them even before that emerged.

This will hopefully give me more energy for campaigns to champion the interrobang (‽) and to reintroduce the letter thorn (Þ) to English.

I’m an em-dash lover but always (and still do) type the double hyphen because that’s what I was taught for APA style years ago

you can absolutely still use `--`, but you need to add spaces around them.

These subs are dying out. Reddit has losts its gatekeepy culture a long time ago and now subs are getting burnt out by waves of low effort posters treating the site like its instagram. Going through new posts on any practical subreddit the response to 99% of them should be "please provide more information on what your issue is and what you have tried to resolve it".

I cant do reddit anymore, it does my head in. Lemmy has been far more pleasant as there is still good posting etiquette.

I'm not aware of anyone bothering to create bots that can pass the checking particular subreddits do. It'd be fairly involved to do so.

For licensed professions, they have registries where you can look people up and confirm their status. The bot might need to carry out a somewhat involved fraud if they're checking.

If you can ride the Metra from your city to Chicago proper, you're in Chicago!

That’s why we need a parallel internet.

I think it's mainly a matter of clarity as long embedded clauses without obvious visual delimiting can be hard to read and thus are discouraged in professional writing aiming for ease of reading from a wide audience. LLMs are trained on such a style.

On a typewriter, you'd be able to just adjust the carriage position to make a continuous dash or underline or what have you. Typically I see XXXX over words instead of strike-throughs for typewritten text meanwhile.

How is the author the problem? What is the problem, in your view?