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.”
That is true but now you see them more often than before in writings of younger people.
I’m 43 and em dashes were rare in random slack messages. Now they are — everywhere.
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.
COLD.
DEAD.
HANDS.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 🙃
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 keybord— and bad at identifying AI responses.
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~~~
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 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.
You can still have the same function using a hyphen. How do you even type an em dash on a standard keyboard?
Compose - -
I assume compose is meant to be a key? What key is compose?
The Compose key.
If you don’t have a compose key, well, you should have one. You can define it easily in the Kde control center. I suppose there’s the equivalent in Gnome.
It was introduced by Sun. It’s very convenient.
Classy
You can pry em dashes out of my cold, dead hands.
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.
I will use them and not feel bad about it. I will not let AI take them from me
Do you use an alt code to type them?
Control + alt + minus, or just two – next to eachother falowed by a word. It’s transfered into m-dash in most word processors. Also almost any correction tools handle them very well almost seamleslly.
On what do you think AI was trained? It didn’t learn that out of nowhere.
Use WinCompose instead.
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.
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+-)TIL, thanks
The only autocorrect I liked because I have no clue how to manually insert an em-dash otherwise
On MacOS:
Opt+Shift+-En dash is the same without the shift
just do like I do, go to wikipedia and copy the character from the page for it.
but on the internet, you might also be able to do
—, depending on if it’s allowed.There were a couple years where spelling/ grammar checks where it would always correct like half of the regular dashes id use into em dashes, and id have to copy an email dash after I spell checked, then ctrl +f all the regular dashes and replace them with the coppied em dash
Maybe she’s AI, maybe she’s literate.
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 ’
The quotes are also common when copying from word as well.
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.
and then there’s me who uses em dashes just because I know it bothers a rather vocal group of people
