I am fairly confident the majority of my LinkedIn network are not experienced writers and don't know what em dash means. All make regular posts with em dashes in them. Their excessive use, combined with a certain presentation style, tells me it's ChatGPT. When I ask them they confirm it's ChatGPT.

This isn't really convincing.

They say the models were trained on a bunch of books and that they learned the use of the dash from there. That's fine, no one is denying that humans have always used dashes in their books.

But where you would bet rarely see a dash would be something like a short product review, a YouTube comment or a WhatsApp message. In these contexts the dashes can and do seem out of place.

I use em dashes constantly.

I've been a Mac user for years, where the em dash is a modified hyphen on the Mac keyboard. When I moved to primarily using PCs, the em dash alt-key combo was the first one I memorized (alt-0151).

Normal people (myself included) are not particularly good at writing and would never use an emdash. The average person won't even use semicolons because of confusion about how to use them and at least those have a dedicated key.

I'm sorry to the professional writers out there, but if I see an emdash in a piece of throw away writing (like a reddit or HN comment) I assume it's AI generated and I now immediately stop reading it.

That's exactly what sentient AI would like us to believe.

Yes, people use the em dash. The point isn't the em dash itself. It's about U+2014. Yeah, in a book, or maybe a quality article, you'd type the em dash properly. But most of the time online? I write it as - or as --.

> I speak of the elegant, elongated hyphen, the gentle friend and ally of all writers, used to set off a chunk of text within a sentence.

There's nothing elegant about a punctuation mark firmly glued to the words on either side, making a sequoia-sized typographic log that typically gets wrapped in its entirety to the next line, leaving a half mile or so of white space just hanging in space before the wrap.

If you're gonna use the em dash, make sure your software can break a line on either side of one.

Long live the em-dash!

I frequently am accused of using LLMs to write my prose, something that I not only eschew, but also believe is morally corrupt and intellectually dishonest.

I’m not above spellcheck, grammar checkers, or even LLM driven evaluation of articles, but my thoughts, word choices, and structure are always of my own design.

I use the em-dash where it is appropriate.

I find that people accusing writers of using AI typically disagree with the premise of the text, and use the “AI” character assault as a method of dehumanising the author and dismissal of their work. The assertion is very rarely made in good faith, but rather is used as a weak attempt to discredit an idea without actually refuting the premise or even examining the argument.

Shame on whoever argues in this way, it’s weak, unproductive, and intellectually lazy. It’s fine to disagree, but if you aren’t willing to act in good faith, just keep your thoughts to yourself. You’re only going to discredit your own point of view if you touch the keyboard.

As a professional writer, I can confirm that my editors love to sprinkle em dahses excessively on my work.

Personally, I'm more prone to excessive semicolon usage, which seems to aggravate editors.

The article title is actually "Stop AI-Shaming Our Precious, Kindly Em Dashes—Please". The HN submission title is the subtitle.

"Point to the keys you press to enter the em dash". And smart quotes. My conjecture (and personal experience) is 99% of the occurrences of these characters is not due to pressing they corresponding keys, it is due to copy paste. So it should not be surprising or considered to be a personal attack on AI.

Writers have used the em dash for centuries, certain members of internet forums and chatrooms have used them for two years. It's a tell.

In 2008-ish I was into web typography for if you may say so. We used to use special tools like https://www.artlebedev.ru/typograf/ to make text appear clear according to typography ideas. That included m-dashes. Amazing to see this subject surfacing again.

I use the em dash as appropriate, similar to semicolons and their ilk.

I don't think use of an em dash is indicative in itself of AI assistance, but rather, the change to using them. Did this person all of a sudden start using them? There are also other things to look at, like how certain bullet point lists have emphasis (for key phrases, being bold, when previously the author didn't do so, stylistically).

I write a lot (as a PM) - I've taken to using MacWhisper, which does local AI dictation, but also (at my configuration) sends it to a ChatGPT prompt first:

"You are a professional proofreader and editor. Your task is to refine and polish the given transcript as follows:

1. Correct any spelling errors.

2. Fix grammatical mistakes.

3. Improve punctuation where necessary.

4. Ensure consistent formatting.

5. Clarify ambiguous phrasing without changing the meaning.

6. If a sentence or paragraph is overly verbose and has more than negligible redundancy, lightly edit for brevity.

7. If the transcript contains a question, edit it for clarity but do not provide an answer.

Please return only the cleaned-up version of the transcript. Do not add any explanations or comments about your edits."

This is great. I get the benefits of pretty accurate transcription while getting a first pass at copyediting almost in real time. It did require me to make some tweaks to my dictation process (allowing it to "chew" on larger chunks to give better context to its editing), but it works very well.

LLMs have also made the word “crucial” suspect. They use that one constantly.

This article is attacking a strawman. Nobody was ever advocating for labeling all em dash usage as AI. Even the tweet they reference (not that random tweets ought to be taken as some sort of authoritative gauge of the current state of society...) does not claim that all em dash usage is AI.

In certain contexts, em dashes are perfectly natural and human. That being said, everyone has encountered articles and posts that read so obviously like AI, and in those contexts the presence of numerous em dashes is certainly an additional data point.

I’ve never used an em dash in my life—but after having AI rewrite a lot of my emails I’m starting to use it more often, though incorrectly most of the time.

I'm just happy that LLMs don't seem particularly fond of semicolons; Their use should be reserved for the daring trailblazers that carve out their own path.

It seems to me that the article is missing the point somewhat. There's absolutely nothing wrong with the em-dash, but most people never use it (I don't think I've ever used it), because it doesn't appear on most standard keyboards.

If you encounter an em-dash in an online discussion, most likely someone went to extra effort to include it, or it was automatically inserted, possibly by an AI.

There are other signs that you're looking at AI-generated texts, like lists of three, a certain turn of phrase, or vague generalities, but those are easier for a human to type than an em-dash.

If you see text from me and it has an em-dash, it's 100% gen AI.

Fixed that for you: _American_ writers have always used the em dash. In British English orthography, space-en dash-space is much more common.

  > Fixed that for you: _American_ writers

It's so stupid that this even needs to be said.

And yet here we ware.

This article completely misses the point from the start.

The reason em dashes are a giveaway for AI generated text is simply because there is no em dash key on the keyboard - only an en dash key. The dash I used in that last sentence was an en dash, not an em dash.

Some publishing applications (including Microsoft Word) will automatically convert en dashes to em dashes where appropriate. But most email apps, chat apps, online posts/comments, and practically any application not designed for writing actual printed publications will not do that conversion for you. And without a dedicated key, it is far too cumbersome for most people to bother. They will just leave it as an en dash.

So yes, the em dash is still a reliable indicator of AI-generated content in many contexts.

I have no idea how this is a real article that people are wasting their time on.

Of course people use the em-dash, and of course LLMs use them at least 10x-100x more than your average human writer. Also, they add nothing to writing, 99.8% people just use an en-dash when typing where an em-dash would be used in print, and absolutely nothing is lost. Some dickheads (like myself) have used a compose key (or similar) to use actual em-dashes in order to seem sophisticated online.

The only people who need the em-dash, as far as I know, are Spanish-language writers. As for LLM-shaming, isn't it more shameful when you publish an article that could easily be entirely written by LLM, but definitely wasn't, like this one?

edit: articles like this make me want to misuse flagging.

I'm glad the em dash is getting properly shit on these days, if for unrelated reasons. I've never liked it. I hate the stupid spacing rules around it. It never looks right to put no spaces around the em dash, and probably breaks all sorts of word-splitting code that's based on "\s". Where else does punctuation without spaces not mean a single word? Hyphens without spaces is a compound word: it counts as one. Imagine if the correct use of a colon was to not put spaces around it:like this. Do you like that? Of course not.

But I think worst of all it just gives me the fucking creeps, some uncanny-valley bullshit. I see hyphens a million times a day then out of nowhere comes this creepy slender-man looking motherfucker that's just a little bit too long than you'd expect or like, and is always touching all the letters around it when it shouldn't need to. It stands out looking like a weird print error... on my screen! Hopefully it keeps building a worse and worse reputation.