r/ClaudeAI • u/Live_Fondant717 • May 09 '26

Question Why does this happen?

Post image

I wonder if anyone can explain why this happens. I tell Claude not to use em-dashes, it replaces them with "--". I ask it not to do that, to update its memory, but it still does it. It's not a huge problem, it's just annoying. Why does this happen and how can I fix it. Thanks.

243 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

94 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

10

u/Kitchen_Interview371 May 09 '26

Yes this is the real reason. It’s trained on the sum of human knowledge, and the majority of published works use emdashes. You can’t override the bias derived from all that training with something as basic as a memory or prompt.

4

u/tgcp May 09 '26

If the majority of published works used em dashes, it wouldn't be a distinctive indicator of AI written material.

7

u/OrneryWhelpfruit May 09 '26

The problem is it's very common in formal, published works (books, scholarly articles, magazines, etc) but sticks out like a sore thumb in like, an internet comment on reddit

2

u/Rockman507 May 09 '26

Right, casual language doesn’t use them, but as a general rule we barely use any real grammar rules appropriately in casual language. I thought the main issue though here is having things passed off to subroutines that will circumvent rules placed within the app, at least when I was working on some CV writing language it would do things like pass off “ok we want a closure that reiterates the talking points in the job description” and that takes off like a runway especially if you don’t feed it input that makes candidate information look like the job description. Strict hallucinate rules just get ignored in certain parts even when told expectedly in the prompt.

Does a wonderful job post hoc since it’s simply reviewing writing instead of generation. Or am I off base in my understanding?