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edit - honestly not a troll. is it the specific formatting of “em” dashes? i know for sure we use them all the time. or at least i do. but they’re just dashes to me, so…
The whole em dash argument is bullshit propagated by LinkedIn lunatics with zero knowledge of AI, writing or typography.
Different types of dashes/hyphens have different uses. People who take care of their copy and understand the nuances of punctuation use em dashes regularly. People who are in a rush, typing on phones or simply who don’t know any better, put the same en dash everywhere.
Em dashes is one of the things that LLMs actually do right for a change. Calling text with em dashes weird, unnatural or ai generated is like making fun of someone for using proper grammar or hygiene.
I think you’re missing the point here. Nobody is saying em dashes are making texts worse.
They’re just one of many indicators that can together allow for a good guess as to whether a text is AI generated or not.
Of course not all texts using them are AI generated, but if you also bold random words, use a lot of unnecessary and obscure emoji, put everything into bulletpoints and end your text with a useless summary, then people might get suspicious.
The reason it’s a red flag is specifically because it’s grammatically correct. People don’t tend to write like that online. Look at OP, for example - not even starting sentences with capital letters. That’s why it stands out when something is written too well to be human. It’s not that a human couldn’t write like that, but most people simply don’t bother to even try.
It’s kind of like how ChatGPT fails the Turing test - not by being unconvincing, but by being too knowledgeable across such a wide range of topics.
People also don’t type in proper punctuation because our keyboards are stuck in the olden times and most online forum and social media platforms are same old garbage what comes to typography.
I’m an amateur writer, I love it when word processors replace straight quotes (") with proper double quotes based on the language (“like this”, ”kuten näin”, «comme ça») and instead of minus (-) you get actual real dashes—as one does. But good luck implementing this on social media. Even blogware handles this pretty badly, the only way to get proper punctuation is to write the post in a word processor.
Depending on the phone and keyboard, I actually find it easier to use em and en dashes on mobile instead of the computer. Usually on mobile I can just hit the button for numbers/symbols and long-press the hyphen-minus, then select the appropriate alternate dash. Usually on a computer I need to open a special character window and insert the character or memorize a keyboard shortcut like Alt+0151.
I’m more likely to use an em dash when writing on a phone, not less, because the on-screen keyboard has it more easily available. It’s when I’m using a physical keyboard writing on desktop that I’m more likely to use two hyphens.
It’s that an iPhone keyboard? My android does not seem to have an em dash easily accessed. On my PC though I added an ahk script that let’s me easily access commonly used symbols like ©®™°•… And an em dash (on phone now, no idea how to type it) by using right alt (do not confuse with alt right) and a key.
Gboard on Android is great for dashes. Of course privacy people will look for alternatives
that’s the breath of somewhat-unpredicted fresh air i was hoping to breathe
edit- i should add that i don’t mean “predicted” in the llm sense.