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Comment by doctorhandshake | Hacker News Reader

Ironically (and perhaps proving the author’s point), when reading I couldn’t help feeling like this was at least AI-assisted writing, if not prasted directly.

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A big giveaway is that for most of the post the author uses hyphens instead of em-dashes, obviously because em-dashes are too difficult to type, but then uses em-dashes in a handful of places that sound exactly like the kind of thing ChatGPT would say.

> A big giveaway is that for most of the post the author uses hyphens instead of em-dashes

I hear this "tip" a lot, and I question whether it's statistically-meaningful.

After spending several decades learning the right ways—like ALT+0151 on Windows—it seems deeply unfair that people are going to mischaracterize care and attention to detail as "fake".

In this case the author mixes em dashes with hyphens surrounded by space. Both fine on their own, but it seems unlikely that someone with the attention to detail to use em dashes is going to be inconsistent here.

In this case I wasn't trying to say that em-dashes themselves are evidence of AI use. I was trying to say that mixing incorrect hyphen usage with correct em-dash usage is evidence of AI use.

But...

Using em-dashes is a signal. It's not a smoking gun, but text that uses em-dashes is more likely to be AI-generated than text that doesn't!

Similarly, text that consistently uses correct spelling and punctuation is more likely to be AI-generated than text that doesn't.

So - yeah - if you use em-dashes your writing looks more like AI wrote it.

But that’s not a bad thing—it means your writing has the same strengths: clarity, rhythm, and elegance. AI learned from the best, and so did you.

I appreciate what you did there.

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