ChatGPT for example almost always uses them. I'm sure they are more common in academic writing, but its now super common on boards like Reddit.
Before LLMs, I think em-dashes mostly signaled that you read books and paid attention to details, to the extent they signaled anything.
We might even be entering some waves of counter-signaling.
[1] They'll never totally nail all of DFW's mannerisms, though.
The slight ambiguity if you don’t do that now irks me, having seen a way to eliminate it.
:)
same thing happened with “delve” — these are just words and grammar, people use them
there is no accurate way to tell whether text came out of a neural network or not
Whenever I see that at the start of a paragraph I know that there's an 80% chance it was written by Gemini.
When looking at the context of a given text, use of certain words or punctuation, can very well indicate AI use.
The "original" example was delve. There is no doubt that AI (did, or still does) use this word at a significantly higher frequency than the average person. I would say the same about em dashes.
When browsing a Reddit thread about a video game, if you encounter numerous comments written perfectly, especially those containing indicators like em dashes, the word delve, or similar language, it certainly can raise the question: am I genuinely seeing comments from users who write this way in this specific context, or is this content more likely produced by an LLM?
No, I learned about em dashes in school, I just literally don't know how to type them on my keyboard and I'm too stubborn to learn how to.
Only typography nerds and professional printers care about things like these. Popular media, even modern professional media, hasn't been paying all that much attention.
To what extent that distinction matters, I'm not sure.
That's not to say that generated content doesn't use them, just that using them as an indicator might require a bit of nuance based on where you're seeing them.
I wonder if it's a more recent phenomenon.
Eventually, people learn to include them out of habit—especially as most people see them as aesthetically nicer than a simple hyphen (-).
[1] https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/H...
Not all though. Many people on HN use em-dashes and other proper punctuation.
If the em dash has spaces around it -- as seen in AP style -- it was probably written by a real human, because that's how it comes out most conveniently on a word processor.
But if the em dash has no spaces around it--Chicago style--there's a good chance you're looking at LLM slop.
Just makes me roll my eyes really seeing a human use an em-dash. We've in the age of informality, and at least for me personally I've definitely filed the em-dash away as "a near guarantee the text was written by a machine". No matter how much and perhaps especially because HN commentators are coming out of the woodworks to insist they've been using it daily for years.