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.

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.