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A lot of editing tools and processes automatically converting `--` to `—`, so folks editing markdown or using a Word processor might get the emdash automatically. Similar things are often done for matching double quotes. I wouldn't be surprised if quite a few WYSIWYG CMS systems do this conversion too.
There are also a lot of input methods that make it trivial to write special characters.
Apple famously uses the Alt/Option key to make inputting a lot of special characters simple. Look at any place that does a lot of writing and publishing, and you're bound to see a lot of Macs.
On Windows, you can memorize and input code points pretty easily as well if you have a number pad. Just hold Alt and punch in the 4-digit character code.
I hop platforms a lot, so I commonly use digraphs with Ctrl+K in VIM, or TeX input in Emacs to insert unicode characters. I'll also use `Ctrl+x 8 <RET>` to insert characters by name in Emacs when I need to search for something specific.
Ditto the directional "smart quotes", OSX inserts them by default (and sometimes breaks stuff like pasting json into Slack).
There certainly are a lot of them in the article.
Smart quotes? I hardly even remember that. I turn that off immediately, along with automatic spell checks (which are a headache if you switch between languages).
Earlier today I saw a YouTube video, it audio started with "calm voice, with a sense of urgency" (something like that) and the voice over stars reading the generated script.
I'm so fucking tired of AI generated content. I'd rather read peoples own writing, with all the errors that entail, or a some Chinese guide going through a tutorial in his own broken English, at least that has character.
And the real kicker is, we're ignoring the point that this isn't a binary distinction. Content can be written by a human and an AI collaboratively, where you can't say that it's totally "human generated" OR totally "AI generated".
In this blog post there' also the distinct lack of an actual introduction, the author just assumes that we know what it's is about, as if we're missing the actual introduction, i.e. the prompt.
Also look at some of the other posts on the site. The writing style of the Django article is much different, more human if you ask me. The author also have a tendency to forget to capitalize the first after a period, as seen in multiple other posts, but not in this one.
You're probably correct, that this is a collaboration, by an AI and someone who's insecure in their English. That's a reasonable "excuse" for posting a AI generated piece of writing, but due to the bombardment of AI generated content, this actually becomes something that is judge harder, and less valuable, than someone just writing about an interesting observation in bad English.