AI loves the em-dash, and Sean Goedecke thinks he’s found out why after exploring a lot of fun theories I had not heard of (including AI trainers in East Africa being fond of the punctuation): modern models are trained on a ton of freshly digitized 19th- and early-20th-century books, back when writers used dashes like it was their job. GPT-3.5 didn’t do this; GPT-4o does. Blame the OCR.
I wrote about how robots are increasingly used in apple orchards for Wall Street Journal. Every piece of tree fruit is picked by hands (well, except for a few in orchards where researchers test these robots out). It’s grueling work even though orchards have been engineered to make picking as simple as possible—the trees are more like grape vines at this point, only about twelve feet tall and grown to keep apples on a two-dimension plane. Standardizing the trees also lets robots, which really struggle in outdoor settings, pick about fifty percent of the fruit right now. So despite the really out of pocket comments on this story, human workers are still needed and not going anywhere. (Gift link)
