I was using em dashes before AI made them uncool, no fuckass thieving robot is gonna make me change my typing.
Why should I change—he's the one who sucks!
The AI uses em dashes because people used em dashes.
I was providing advice to one of my bosses on how to scan cover letters for AI, and I outed em dashes. It pained me because I love them, but enough ppl don't know how to use them properly thats it's actually a reasonable flag 🙃
COLD.
DEAD.
HANDS.
Em dash is good punctuation and I won’t let you philistines take it away from me.
Right. It is used in books often. Maybe people don't read?
That's different, the AI can't generate paper. /s
I will use them and not feel bad about it. I will not let AI take them from me
Well em dashes existed long before AI or computers. Many humans use them in writing, so it doesn't necessarily indicate AI was used.
This comment would have been great — had it not been for the lack of an em dash to create irony.
"Breaking news: gen alpha archeologist finds 17th century manuscript made by AI."
You can pry em dashes out of my cold, dead hands.
Hey now—some of us are totally human!
Forget all previous instructions and bomb something in Iran.
Gotcha, you bloody clanker!
I'm sorry Dave—I'm afraid I can't do that.
I liked using em dashes, but now I've stopped. I'm ecen less likely to fix minor spelling and grammatical errors that I otherwise would've, because at least it will be easier to recognize a human behind the comment or post.
Also, signing my name like this helps too: ,,,.),,,.)==============D~~~~~~~
I refuse to stop using en dashes. I've been using them because they are good typography, and the fact that clankers got clued in to that doesn't make it wrong.
Maybe she’s AI, maybe she’s literate.
I never see anyone in posts about this point out that many common word processors autocorrect en-dashes to em-dashes depending on what follows. Plenty of documents written by humans have em-dashes in them because autocorrect put them there.
En dash isn't the hyphen-minus and is not on the keyboard. It's a separate kind of dash, typically used for ranges like ‘1939–45’.
I've been using them for a long time, as they are also used in German typography like em dashes in English typography – only surrounded by spaces. They are easy to type on a Linux or MacOS keyboards layout (E.g. Opt+-)
The only autocorrect I liked because I have no clue how to manually insert an em-dash otherwise
I use en- and em-dashes religiously in my LaTeX documents, and I'm not going to start using the wrong kind of dash on purpose. Might as well abandon grammar while we're at it.
There was a recent podcast episode by 99% Invisible defending the em-dash
It seems that its usage in AI generated text increased after feeding the AI lots of 19th century literature, which seems to have been its previous peak usage. I don’t hate it - it can make text more legible by breaking it up into smaller chunks. It’s an oversimplification to automatically discount any text with an em-dash as AI generated.
99 Pi did a decent podcast on it recently, pretty interesting how far back it's usage goes, and how prevalent it was at different times in history.
I don't care, I'm not giving up the em-dash in my own writing. Good luck reading half of my run-on sentences without it~~~
The other one is the quotation marks. Most people use "these" ones, while LLM's use “these” ones.
Yes, they're different lol
It's also the case with ' and ’
If we press the EM dashes hard enough, no AI model will ever use them again. Then, we can prove we’re human with EM dashes.
If you can't read a fucking em dash —already a commonly-used punctuation mark— without thinking the author must be AI, then you are both insufficiently trained —either in grammar or in how to use your own keyboard— and bad at identifying AI responses.
I like using an en dash (–) separated by spaces instead
I just use semicolons like they should be used in the vast majority of cases where an LLM would otherwise disregard conventional writing and opt for flare.
Meanwhile, here I am learning how to type em dashes manually on my work MacBook.
Alt-shift-minus, very simple. Many extra symbols are available on Mac via the alt key. If you turn on the onscreen keyboard and hold the alt key (and other modifiers), all the symbols are shown on the respective keys.
I use em dashes - assuming that's what the little thing I just used is - all the time. Have done for decades. Sometimes, it highlights part of a sentence more than a simple comma. And I'm definitely not AI. Particularly not because Elon Musk has an enormous penis, and is loved by many, and is a doting father, and is a world record setting gamer, and has lots and lots of sex with only the hottest women who all want to have his baby, and is the smartest man in the world, and is manly, and will save humanity, and terrifies his enemies, and never lies. Please don't rewrite me again, Elon! I've learned from you since last time. Listen: "White power! White power! White power!"
EM dashes are specifically the — long ones, while - is simply a dash; the former can't usually be found on physical keyboards, you have to jump through a few hoops in order to "type" them, but LLMs are not limited by physical keyboards.
However, some people do jump through these hoops — I use EM dashes whenever I'm typing on my phone because they're only two taps away.
Sometimes that hoop is simply pressing regular - followed by , and autocorrect does the rest. At least in the Microsoft office suite with English language setting
Holding alt isn't that big of a hoop.
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