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Comment by arrowsmith | Hacker News Reader

I might have fallen for it if not for the em-dash.

Ergh. My muscle memory is to use Opt+- with great frequency. Presumably that means folks will start to flag my stuff as generated.

Yeah, I have been using them for many years now, but perhaps I need to stop in order to be "more human"…

I find myself having to avoid certain words and phrases these days in case people think I'm using ChatGPT.

"You’re absolutely right!"

"This isn't about [thing]—it's about [other thing]."

"It’s important to note that..."

"Delve"

Many such cases.

Nah, it's fine as we are all actual human and nobody here is a giant spider.

[Opt]+[-] is for en-dash (at least on macos). For an em-dash, it's [Shift]+[Opt]+[-].

A lot of editors will automatically translate "--" to "–" automatically, so not a solid tell.

— or –? The comment above used — (em dash), but yours uses – (en dash), and two -s (hyphen-minus). Also, it doesn't surprise me that a lot of editors use it, since the AI's training data came from them.

Mea culpa. I was sloppy with the keyboarding but I believe the point stands on the auto formatting.

As a programmer, I'm always keen to create a new written (on a computer) English language with improved syntax.

I'm quite jealous of some features from other languages e.g. I want to be able to wortzusammensetzung words in English.

Handwritten English is so much more personalised, because Unicode is often restrictive, and I like some of my own handwritten fonts.

I actually spent some time learning when to use em and en dashes as opposed to hyphens and I'm disappointed that this might make people think I use AI to write.

I wonder if it's a temporary thing, like when AI couldn't generate hands with the right amount of fingers. (Doesn't that feel like a long time ago? It was only last year.)

Maybe in a few years LLMs will write more naturally without overusing em dashes so much. Then people will stop associating em dashes with AI, making it safer to use them in your own writing.

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