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ZDNET's key takeaways
AI models follow certain structural rules when generating text.
This can make it easier to identify their writing.
They tend towards contrasts, for example: "It's not X -- it's Y."
The past few years have seen a flood of AI-generated text wash over the internet. As the models behind this text improve, so too does their ability to imitate the intricacies of human speech; at the same time, our methods for detecting it have been improving, and there's been an active online dialogue about some of the most common quirks of AI-generated text.
Historically, one of the more well-known tells of ChatGPT, for example, has been the chatbot's fondness for em dashes. It would often punctuate its sentences with em dash-bounded breaks to emphasize a point -- as if a longer, more breathless sentence would have a more potent effect on the reader -- peppering in supportive arguments mid-sentence in a way that to some users feels antiquated and mechanical -- but to a computer trained on a vast quantity of training data littered with em dashes is totally normal…you get the idea.
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Following complaints about ChatGPT's em dash proclivity, and a commitment to build models that could be more easily customized to the preferences of individual users, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced in a X post last month that ChatGPT would stop using those punctuation marks in its outputs if prompted to do so. While many users probably celebrated the news, it also meant that writing generated by the chatbot would be that much more difficult to detect; bad news for teachers, many employers, and anyone else for whom it's important to have a reliable means of distinguishing human- from AI-generated text.
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