In Reply to: sorry state? It’s always been sorry posted by amadbruin on August 18, 2026 at 10:43:33
time honored devices that also happen to be very popular, which is probably how they found their way into AI. 3 things strung in a conjunction or disjunction is like the optimal number in terms of cadence, IMO, hence their popularity, my guess. M-dashes, OTOH, are kinda like parentheticals in that they deviate from the main idea of the sentence, but it's intended as a different direction, not an additional note or explanation, which is how I use them, personally. It's a good way to add a snide remark, for instance. I don't know what you can actually replace it with. Too bad AI keeps overusing these and poisoning the well for all of us.
AI is a tool, and there are areas where it is very useful. I use google search for meanings of words and their synonyms a lot, and I can see how a well-trained LLM can be another useful tool in the hands of someone who is intending to their own writing. Probably beats pacing the in the room and mumbling things like "that sounds awful, there's gotta be a better of saying it".
And then there is the corporate world who has been fixated on AI for more than a decade as a way to "increase productivity", translated into regular speech as "laying off employees so that I can get a nice bonus and the people up the ladder get to hit their brutal targets so that they can be paid even more".
With the insight I've gained from "Bullsh*t Jobs", I am now wondering if all this will actually have minimal impact on employment, with the definition of people's jobs shifting from, say, writing the documents, to something like training and proofreading the AI (and inevitably, rewriting the document from scratch after repeated failures).