Ai

In the past I’ve written about the em dash and how people associate it with text written by AI. My conclusion was that I’ve been using it for ages before AI was a thing and the joke at the end was that I should stop using it, so AI might stop using it, so I can use it again. Well, turns out I have not always been using it. See, there’s different dashes and due to my personal inconsistency and a plethora of text editors, different dashes have appeared in my writing over the years. The one I used most is the hyphen (-). This mark should actually be used (among other things) to connect compound words, like open-source, or for prefixes and suffixes, like co-founder and secretary-general. ...

It’s hard to pick which book to read next. Especially if you have many. I’ve spent far too much time in front of my bookcases, pondering what’s next. Still, standing there I can pull a book and read the jacket. Put it back, read another. On and on until something tickles my fancy. This is impossible with e-books on a Kindle. I just have a massive list of way too many books sitting there with no real way to discover the next binge. I’d either pick at random and live with my choices, or google titles for blurbs on another device. Title after title after title after title… wait—what was that first one again? It’s no way to live. ...

When you see one, it’s AI. In any text, if there’s a dash anywhere, AI wrote it. It’s a guarantee. Except, it is not. I recently dove into my old websites in my This Domain post. I noticed something. All the way back in 2004 I used dashes in my writing. They show up in the screenshot I took of my site in 2012 as well. Twice even! Both the first and the second post have one. There’s three of them in the first post of this website even. ...

I see it everywhere now. AI code. Code that pretends to be written by a person, but isn’t. You can smell it if you’ve been around code long enough. It’s too clean. Too eager to please. Every function name is a sentence. Every comment explains the obvious, like it’s written by someone explaining programming to a golden retriever. Sometimes there’s even an emoji in there. An emoji. In code. Real code has scars. You can see where someone tried something stupid at two in the morning, got it working, and never touched it again. There’s a weird indentation that no one can explain. Variable names start sensible, then drift into chaos. Half a function is commented out “just in case.” ...