I just found out reddit sold everything we wrote to AI companies… and honestly I don’t know how to feel
I just found out reddit sold everything we wrote to AI companies… and honestly I don’t know how to feel
So I was reading about Reddit’s API controversy from 2023 and fell down a rabbit hole.
Turns out every post, every comment, every opinion you’ve shared here - reddit licensed it to openai and google. No opt-out. No warning. Just. - done.
And that’s just reddit. Meanwhile Google, Meta, and basically every major platform are quietly building a profile on you — your interests, your political leanings, your daily routine, your insecurities. All from things you said or clicked on “anonymously.”
The wild part? We already knew this was happening. It’s not new. Yet here we all are, still posting.
So I’m genuinely curious — why do you still use reddit (or big tech in general) knowing this?
Is it because:
- The alternatives (Lemmy- kbin- etc…) just aren’t there yet?
- You’ve accepted it as the price of the internet
- You actually don’t think it’s that big a deal?
- Or you simply never thought about it until now?
Not judging anyone — I’m still here too. Just want to hear honest answers.
As someone who writes lengthy posts with dashes (see my post history) the text in OP’s screenshot is probably not out of an LLM.
There are zero em dashes, three compressed double-dashes, and four single dashes all used in the same casual way to break the flow of text, along with some ellipses and numerous grammatical inconsistencies/informalities which indicate that’s just how they write.
But they’re all different. Just so you know,
This is an em dash (note its length): —
This is an en dash (slightly shorter, but still longer than a regular dash, and has specific uses): –
This is a regular dash, the one on your keyboard: -
And different from them all, the compressed double dash. That’s what’s in OP’s screenshot, and they’re what you get on Lemmy and Reddit when you type two dashes together with no spaces between, and it passes for the em dash in human writing.
This is a compressed double-dash: –
Here on Lemmy, it looks exactly the same as an en dash, and that’s the tell: no one really uses en dashes outside specific circumstances like a parenthetical range of numbers, and why would they? En dashes are a pain in the ass. I don’t even know the keyboard shortcut for them.
But regardless of whatever else it may look like, a compressed double dash (–) is always shorter than a real em dash (—).
You can always look at the source of a comment (the little paper icon under it) to know which has been used. The only real em dashes in my online writing ever come from material copied from a source that uses them, because I don’t, at least not online.
Also, LLMs will generally employ em dashes in the old style (think books published on paper during the 19th and 20th centuries) where there is no space between the em dash and the letter it follows, like this— but I find that irritating, because visually it breaks a sentence like someone vocally stopping themselves mid-phrase. So I never do it myself, and most human writers do not anymore (though there are some) and generally it hasn’t been the style for at least twenty, thirty years now though you’ll see it in older publications like The New Yorker where their style guide hasn’t changed since the 1930s.
Rather, a human writer will generally employ an em dash — or a compressed double dash – with spaces before and after, or at least after. Like I just did. Look at the source, see it for yourself.
As someone who has written with em dashes for well over forty years I want them back, goddammit.
99% Invisible did a recent episode of their podcast defending the em dash. They discuss the fact that it is too reductive to assume that any text containing em dashes is AI-generated, given that bots have been trained on text from the em dash’s heyday.
I look forward to the day we can use them again without having to defend our humanity.
Weird - I use them all the time - and no one’s accused me of being anything other than an old fart, (“…Okay 'boomer…” - which I now wear as a badge of online longevity honor…) or at best, a nuisance best kept from polite society.
I see what you did there, lol.
I’ve been accused multiple times of “being AI” on Lemmy alone, and it always amazes me. Usually, as far as I can tell, it’s just for being long winded and having complex sentence structure. Every time, I look back at the post they are accusing of having come out of an LLM, with all its grammatical imperfections and missed punctuation, lacking all of the polish and shine and smooth-to-the-point-of-fawning language LLMs produce, and think what are these people reading???
But strangely they never accuse me of being an old fart or call me a boomer, which would actually be true.
You said it in the post… “long-winded, complex sentence structure…” By and large the bulk of users here are two, maybe three decades younger than we are, and as such, they came of age and were educated in the post-Reagan era. You can really throw some of them for a loop and use colons and semi-colons in a few nice independent clauses.
Not to digress too much, have you seen the videos on youtube by Elle Cordova? Her “Grammarian” videos are a riot.
I do so love clever use of language…
No, I hadn’t seen those before now, thanks for the recommendation. The one you linked was great; I’ll have to look at the rest of them. I haven’t seen a physically bound copy of the Chicago Manual of Style since the 80s, but even so the Errorist caused me to physically cringe a couple times, lol.
Maybe I should get another copy. I write as I think and then try to clean it up afterward, which means that in reality I only have enough grammar to be able to look back and see what is still wrong after I’ve already posted something. I could use the polish!
hard disagree on whitespace. every book i’ve ever read doesn’t use any next to emdashes.
The dashes in the reddit post being discussed are em dashes, not en dashes. In any case, I’m skeptical of the claim that double dashes written in the reddit text input box transform into something else. Though, I no longer have a reddit account which I could use to check. It looks like there is a way to write em dashes on reddit, but it isn’t with 2 sequential hyphens.