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Whenever I see an em dash (—), I suspect the entire text was written by an AI.
by protontypes 11mo ago
Whenever I see an em dash (—), I suspect the entire text was written by an AI.
- defgeneric 11mo agoI'm seeing this reaction a lot from younger people (say, roughly under 25). And it's a shame this new suspicion has now translated into a prohibition on the use of dashes.
- almosthere 11mo agoIt's comical too because the only reason AI uses emdashes is because it was so common before AI.
- kazinator 11mo agoIt's utterly uncommon in the kind of casual writing for which people are using AI, that's why it got noticed. Social media posts, blogs, ... AI almost certainly picked it up mainly from typeset documents, like PDF papers. It's also possible that some models have a tokenizing rule for recognizing faked-out em-dashes made of hyphens and turning them into real em-dash tokens.
- svat 11mo agoNot uncommon even on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45071722 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45071722 On my own (long abandoned) blog, about 20% of (public) posts seem to contain an em dash: https://shreevatsa.wordpress.com/?s=%E2%80%94 https://shreevatsa.wordpress.com/?s=%E2%80%94 (going by 4 pages of search results for the em dash vs 21 pages in total).
- kazinator 11mo agoI use three hyphens. In my case, I picked it up from Knuth's TeX many years ago; it's a lexical notation which typesets to a proper em dash. Three hyphens---it looks good! When I use three hyphens, it's like I dropped three fast rounds out of a magazine. It demands attention.
- protontypes 11mo agoMaybe because the em dash is not on the keyboard of most people? It is not about the dash, but about the long em dash.
- int_19h 11mo agoIt's very easy to type on macOS, not to mention auto-substitution that many apps have (and these days this extends to web browsers).
- psunavy03 11mo agoThat says more about your lack of writing skills and understanding of grammar than AI.
- happytoexplain 11mo agoThat's simply not true, and pointlessly derogatory. This article does not appear to be AI-written, but use of the emdash is undeniably correlated with AI writing. Your reasoning would only make sense if the emdash existed on keyboards. It's reasonable for even good writers to not know how or not care to do the extra keystrokes to type an emdash when they're just writing a blog post - that doesn't mean they have bad writing skills or don't understand grammar, as you have implied.
- johnisgood 11mo agoPressing "-" and a space gets replaced by an emdash to me in LibreOffice. No extra keystrokes required.
- benji-york 11mo agoI don't think the character is that uncommon in the output of slightly-sophisticated writers and is not hard to generate (e.g., on macOS pressing option-shift-minus generates an em-dash).
- Kerrick 11mo agoIn fact, on macOS and iOS simply typing two dashes (--) gets autocorrected to an em dash. I used it heavily, which was a bit sloppy since it doesn't also insert the customary hair spaces around the em dash. Incidentally, I turned this autocorrection off when people started associating em dashes with AI writing. I now leave them manual double dashes--even less correct than before, but at least people are more likely to read my writing.
- Izkata 11mo agoThat's an en dash, not an em dash. An em dash is longer and as far as I know Libreoffice doesn't have a built-in way to make one (though you may have added it to the autocorrect settings yourself). en dash: https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+2013 https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+2013 em dash: https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+2014 https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+2014 Edit: Ah, Libreoffice does have a built-in autocorrect for em dash, but you have to type this: :---:
- DannyPage 11mo agoThe article itself is very skeptical of AI, so I highly doubt that's the case. Also in the footer: "Everything on this website—emdash and all—is created by a human."
- amflare 11mo agoIronically, I love using em dashes in my writing, but if I ever have to AI generate an email or summary or something, I will remove it for this exact reason.
- dkersten 11mo agoI used to use them, but stopped because I feel it makes people think that I used an AI to write.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- random3 11mo agoWhenever I see these takes, I'm thinking of Idiocracy - a world built on very simple rules, like yours.
- commandlinefan 11mo agoI published a book once (way before LLMs came along). My publisher insisted that I replace parenthetical inserts with em dashes. Humans do use them.