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Comment by d1sxeyes | Hacker News Reader

For us habitual users of em-dashes, it is saddening to have to think twice about using them lest someone think we are using an LLM to write…

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My wife is a professional fiction writer and it's disheartening to see sudden accusations of the use of AI based solely on the usage of em-dashes.

Does it really matter though? I just focus on the point someone is trying to make, not on the tools they use to make it.

You’ve never run into a human with a tendency to bullshit about things they don’t have knowledge of?

I use the en-dash (Alt+0150) instead of the em.

The en-dash and the em-dash are interchangeable in Finnish. The shorter form has more "inoffensive" look-and-feel and maybe that's why it's used more often here.

Now that I think of it, I don't seem to remember the alt code of the em-dash...

> The en-dash and the em-dash are interchangeable in Finnish.

But not in English, where the en-dash is used to denote ranges.

I wonder whether ChatGPT and the like use more en dashes in Finnish, and whether this is seen as a sign that someone is using an LLM?

In casual English, both em and en dashes are typically typed as a hyphen because this is what’s available readily on the keyboard. Do you have en dashes on a Finnish keyboard?

> Do you have en dashes on a Finnish keyboard?

Unlikely. But Apple’s operating systems by default change characters to their correct typographic counterparts automatically. Personally, I type them myself: my muscle memory knows exactly which keys to press for — – “” ‘’ and more.

The main uses of the em-dash (set closed as separators of parts of sentences, with different semantics when single or paired) can be substituted in English with an en-dash set open. This is not ambiguous with the use of en-dash set closed for ranges, because of spacing. There are a few less common uses that an en-dash doesn’t substitute for, though.

I too use em-dashes all the time, and semi-colons of course.

Most keyboards don't have an em-dash key, so what do you expect?

On an Apple OS running default settings, two hyphens in a row will suffice—

I also use em-dash regularly. In Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Word, when you type double dash, then space, it will be converted to an em-dash. This is how most normies type an em-dash.

I'm not reading most conversations on Outlook or Word, so explain how they do it on reddit and other sites? Are you suggesting they draft comments in Word and then copy them over?

I don’t think there’s a need to use Word. On iOS, I can trivially access those characters—just hold down the dash key in the symbols part of the keyboard. You can also get the en-dash that way (–) but as discussed it’s less useful in English.

I don’t know if it works on the Finnish keyboard, but when I switch to another Scandinavian language it’s still working fine.

On macOS, option-dash will give you an en-dash, and option-shift-dash will give you an em-dash.

It’s fantastic that just because some people don’t know how to use their keyboards, all of a sudden anyone else who does is considered a fraud.

Fair point! I am talking about when people receive Outlook emails or Word docs that contain em-dashes, then assume it came from ChatGPT. You are right: If you are typing "plain text in a box" on the Reddit website, the incidence of em-dashes should be incredibly low, unless the sub-Reddit is something about English grammar.

Follow-up question: Do any mobile phone IMEs (input method editors) auto-magically convert double dashes into em-dashes? If yes, then that might be a non-ChatGPT source of em-dashes.

On Macs double dash will be converted to an em-dash (in some apps?) unless you untick "use smart quotes and dashes". See https://superuser.com/questions/555628/how-to-stop-mac-to-co...

I'm on Firefox and it doesn't seem to affect me, but I'm pretty sure I've seen it in Safari.

Although I’m an outlier, Compose Key makes typing them trivial.

On an iOS device, you literally just type a dash twice and it gets autocorrected into an emdash. You don’t have to do anything special. I’m on an iPad right now, here’s one: —

And if you type four dashes? Endash. Have one. ——

“Proper” quotes (also supposedly a hallmark of LLM text) are also a result of typing on an iOS device. It fixes that up too. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Android phones do this too. These supposed “hallmarks” of generated text are just the results of the typographical prettiness routines lurking in screen keyboards.

Mobile keyboards have them, desktop systems have keyboard shortcuts to enter them. If you care about typography, you quickly learn those. Some of us even set up a Compose key [0], where an em dash might be entered by Compose ‘3’ ‘-’.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key

Its about the actual character - if it's a minus sign, easily accessible and not frequntly autocorrected to a true em dash - then its likely human. I'ts when it's the unicode character for an em dash that i start going "hmm"

Us habitual users of em dashes have no trouble typing them, and don’t think that emulating it with hyphen-minus is adequate. The latter, by the way, is also different typographically from an actual minus sign.

The em dash is also pretty accessible on my keyboard—just option+shift+dash

Mobile keyboards often make the em-dash (and en-dash) easily accessible. Software that does typographic substitutions including contextual substitutions with the em-dash is common (Word does it, there are browser extensions that do it, etc.), on many platforms it is fairly trivial to program your keyboard to make any Unicode symbol readily accessible.

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