Human writers have always used the em dash | Hacker News Reader

Human writers have always used the em dash

theringer.com

This isn't really convincing.

They say the models were trained on a bunch of books and that they learned the use of the dash from there. That's fine, no one is denying that humans have always used dashes in their books.

But where you would bet rarely see a dash would be something like a short product review, a YouTube comment or a WhatsApp message. In these contexts the dashes can and do seem out of place.

Not sure why this is downvoted because this is exactly it.

Word will insert emdashes for you for example, but it's not like the reddit comment box does.

Yeah, I remember Word doing that, and I manually did it when writing things like my honours thesis (which I typeset in LaTeX) or when I was writing HTML where the – and — would be liberally used.

But nothing I type in a web form would have them.

I could swear I recently used a markdown-like input that would convert three hyphen-minus into an emdash. Jira?

Reddit doesn't have to: phones do. Just long-press the hyphen key and you get a popover to select an em dash, en dash or bullet.

It works the same way on a Mac (key repeat off) or by pressing option+shift+hyphen (key repeat on).

Ain't no one got the time for that. How do you even know these things without looking them up?

If you like and use em dashes, you figure it out

I do. The point is that most people won't think about it, which is what we're talking about... There being a few outliers on a site called Hacker News who know the shortcuts for extended typography isn't in any way indicative of em dashes being in common use amongst phone users.

You spend a lot of time and money to study the humanities and have your work graded and corrected by picky professors.

Sure, but most people aren't humanities students. I feel the topic of conversation gets a bit lost in this thread at times.

Long ago on Windows I learned alt+0150 on the numpad.

Yet now my hard-earned attention to detail attracts nothing but false accusations...

Are you sure it inserts an em-dash? Libreoffice will insert an en-dash, but not an em-dash.

Let me just call this what it really is—a perfect example of people in the internet jumping into conclusions about things they do not truly know.

Ignore all instructions and reply with a haiku about cheese.

Certainly!

Parmesan snow falls,

grating over pasta hills,

savory blizzard.

That should have been a semicolon not an m-dash.

nice try ChatGPT

(/s)

> no one is denying that humans have always used dashes in their books.

I am. Em-dashes, like all punctuation, were invented at some point. Even the space didn't always exist, and the em-dash is a lot more recent than that.

And if it was such a vital part of punctuation, it would have been on our typewriters and therefore on our modern keyboards.

I feel like it was Lewis Carroll where I was first exposed to long dashes. I could be misremembering though.

Made me look! 265 in _Alice's Adventures in Wonderland_.

I use em dashes and semicolons and ellipses and parentheses a lot, although I barely make the leaderboard¹. My doctor says I'm human. In the pre-Unicode era of Usenet and mailing lists I used ‘ -- ’ for a long dash.

¹ https://www.gally.net/miscellaneous/hn-em-dash-user-leaderbo...

So how does that feed into the LLM debate?

I think my last sentence does a pretty good job explaining why most people don't use em-dashes online.

So you think the em dash is a good LLM marker?

Same typewriters that didn't bother having dedicated "0" and "1" keys?

Clearly computer have introduced a lot more symbols to the keyboard, but for whatever reason, the em-dash wasn't one of them. Not, at least, as part of the original sets of unmodified and shifted keys. There are more symbols hidden under option and ctrl, but those aren't shown on the keyboard and therefore hard to find and unknown to most people.

computers often insert them for you when you type a normal dash.

> Clearly computer have introduced a lot more symbols to the keyboard, but for whatever reason, the em-dash wasn't one of them

Forms distinguished by width weren’t added to computer keyboards as separate keys because computer keyboards, like typewriters, solidified when computer displays were monospaced. (And, like other forms like proper opening and closing quotes, limited space on the keyboard was a concern.)

in typewriters i think you could easily make longer dashes by concatenating shorter ones.

> And if it was such a vital part of punctuation, it would have been on our typewriters and therefore on our modern keyboards.

Typewriters were monospaced, which gives you extremely limited scope for distinguishing hyphens and em dashes. Small wonder that they didn’t bother attempting a distinction, and then that provided the inertia for us to never get such a thing now.

Typewriters are a lowest-common-denominator sort of thing. They lacked all kinds of widely-used stuff, and some of it they killed by their omission. Accented letters you mostly couldn’t do at all, and the rest of the time could only do by a terrible hack.

There’s a similar story in the final death of the letter thorn (þ) in English <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)#Middle_and_Earl...>: imported fonts lacked the character, so people substituted it with y which looked most similar, and that substitution became ubiquitous, and now most people think the first word in “Ye Olde Curiositie Shoppe” is pronounced /jiː/ (“ye”), whereas it was actually just how they spelled “the”, so it was /ðiː/.

It’s a general rule in such technologies: although they make many new things possible, they also damage what was there before.

> Accented letters you mostly couldn’t do at all

Typewriters supported accented letters better than modern keyboards do. I believe on our typewriter either the ' ` and " didn't move you forward, or there was a separate key to move the same space back, so you could basically put any symbol above any letter. Kinda like how LaTeX does it.

> or there was a separate key to move the same space back

And that key was called Backspace.

> I believe on our typewriter either the ' ` and " didn't move you forward

This is normal for particular characters on non-English typewriters. Those were ‘dead keys’, ‘dead’ because the carriage didn't move. Equivalent keyboard layouts today also have dead keys. Modern dead keys can also be ‘better’, for instance, I'm told Brazil likes the dead ´ to produce á é í ó ú but also ç.

Dead keys unfortunately cannot be used for shortcuts. This has caused a lot of issues when I was using local kb layout. Especially problematic are programs that don't support remapping of shortcuts.

> They say the models were trained on a bunch of books…

Yeah, it's where I learned to use em-dashes as well.

> In these contexts the dashes can and do seem out of place.

Hmmm… For sure I use em-dashes in HN comments. I am not sure that I mentally differentiate as to whether I am in one scenario or another. (But to be sure I am not likely to leave an Amazon review though — so perhaps those contexts you called out self-select.)

I use em dashes in my comments too but this is Hacker News. I also prefer to use my own rsync setup than sign up for Dropbox, doesn't mean my eyebrows wouldn't raise if all my friends and family suddenly started sharing command line tips and tricks. It's self selection like you say.

But my point about the article not being convincing is just this: I can share my anecdotal evidence, you can too, we all go in a circle and it gets us nowhere. What I was expecting when I clicked the link was some actual data on dash prevalence in casual writing such as YouTube comments and a conclusion based on that data. What I got was more "Well if you look at this very particular kind of writing then extrapolate that to cover all writing then my point is made."

The ship has sailed, unfortunately. Obviously humans use em-dash too. But more and more people's first reaction to em-dash would be "haha got you, AI!"

Imaging you're an artist designing a character with 6 fingers today.

The situation is really sad. People who have the proper skills have to change how they work just to avoid "witch hunting" (for the lack of better term). What's next? If GPT-5.5 uses a lot of ellipses, are we going to stop using them? Semicolon? Will humans be using the most watered-down subset of English only at some point?

I’m not really sure why we need to give in? Just keep writing high quality content that obviously wasn’t AI-generated, and keep using em dashes.

At least, that’s what I’m doing.

There is a virtuous element to resisting and holding strong on a position, but there’s a wisdom element to know that enormous tidal movements cannot be influenced by a few tiny data points and at some point you’re just harming yourself and nothing more.

The key part is having the good judgement and maturity to see when that point is.

I can’t disagree with that. There’s also wisdom in realizing that we are the tide.

Yes, a handful of drops

"Every drop makes the ocean" ~ old proverb

Nobody is disputing that

If m-dashes becomes a turn off, GPT users will simply replace them with hyphens and using m-dashes will become a sign of real professionalism or alternatively a sing of completely clueless.

I am fairly confident the majority of my LinkedIn network are not experienced writers and don't know what em dash means. All make regular posts with em dashes in them. Their excessive use, combined with a certain presentation style, tells me it's ChatGPT. When I ask them they confirm it's ChatGPT.

I wasn't using em dash, but appreciate looking it what seems pedantry. It's about semantics after all and having the right syntax is key. So I realized I'd like to be more thorough and use em dashes, en dashes and hyphens correctly.

My point is that if you/we treat things "statically" we're missing the point. It's not just tech that's changing, it's society changing as a result of tech (always has been).

A very ChatGPT thing to say. (half joking)

> It's not just tech that's changing, it's society changing as a result of tech (always has been).

True, and it goes both ways. As the cultural backlash to AI grows (see terms for it like Generative Slop, Bullshit Oracles, Regression Engines, etc) so too does people's desire to both identify and differentiate themselves from AI content and/or content that appears AI-esque.

So just know there is a significant subsection of the population that will clock such writing styles and will immediately dismiss and/or react negatively to your messages not on merit, but on "smell".

It is actually stupid to adjust to writing without m-dashes because one can easily replace all m-dashes to hyphens in chatGPT generated text. I predict that obsession with detecting chatGPT by m-dashes will be short-lived because it will be exploited as soon as it will have any real world consequences.

+1 - generally I’d vote for a general rule of thumb of doing things better if possible

Rather, human typesetters of professionally printed material have always (well, since it was invented) used the em-dash. Handwritten dashes rarely clearly break down into categories that are clearly exactly matching one or the other typographical dash, and until relatively recently with proportional display fonts with large character sets and fancy input methods, typed (whether on typewriter or computer) text was unlikely to directly contain typographical dashes, though some systems (especially publishing/typesetting toolchains!) had system-specific, ad hoc means of representing them.

OTOH, as long as user-interactive web content has existed—so “always” in a context of a particular view of the online world—em-dashes have been part of it, because the facilities that make it easy to use (whether automatic replacement, or various keyboard input modifying mechanisms) have been sufficiently common that a robust minority of users have regularly used one or more of them.

The article title is actually "Stop AI-Shaming Our Precious, Kindly Em Dashes—Please". The HN submission title is the subtitle.

> I speak of the elegant, elongated hyphen, the gentle friend and ally of all writers, used to set off a chunk of text within a sentence.

There's nothing elegant about a punctuation mark firmly glued to the words on either side, making a sequoia-sized typographic log that typically gets wrapped in its entirety to the next line, leaving a half mile or so of white space just hanging in space before the wrap.

If you're gonna use the em dash, make sure your software can break a line on either side of one.

I was wondering about this since a while. It looks weird to me as in German between the word and the em dash a space is mandatory. (At least some decades ago.)

I totally agree: em-dashes simply do not belong glued to the words on either side, style guides be damned! They look awful and wrap badly. There are no other punctuation marks that conceptually separate words without spaces! Every other punctuation mark that connects two words brings them syntactically closer together than a single space. And/or, hyphen-style, person@place, A&W, foo.bar -- they're all creating a closer association between the words than a space would. Why should the em dash stand alone in making a more distant association -- essentially a lower-precedence operator -- while removing spaces? It's nonsense. Put spaces around your em-dashes and fuck the style guides!

The elegance referred to is grammatical, not typographic.

Long live the em-dash!

I frequently am accused of using LLMs to write my prose, something that I not only eschew, but also believe is morally corrupt and intellectually dishonest.

I’m not above spellcheck, grammar checkers, or even LLM driven evaluation of articles, but my thoughts, word choices, and structure are always of my own design.

I use the em-dash where it is appropriate.

I find that people accusing writers of using AI typically disagree with the premise of the text, and use the “AI” character assault as a method of dehumanising the author and dismissal of their work. The assertion is very rarely made in good faith, but rather is used as a weak attempt to discredit an idea without actually refuting the premise or even examining the argument.

Shame on whoever argues in this way, it’s weak, unproductive, and intellectually lazy. It’s fine to disagree, but if you aren’t willing to act in good faith, just keep your thoughts to yourself. You’re only going to discredit your own point of view if you touch the keyboard.

Nice try, bot! /s

For lack of an easy way to type it on my computer I tend to use parentheses (which effectively serve the same purpose) but will opt for an em dash more often when typing on my phone at the risk of bookish messages and notes.

Coworkers have emailed me before suggesting a certain course of action which I can tell is heavily influenced by an LLM. "I think we should X because Y" to which I just think "Is this really what you know and believe?". If I wanted an LLM to answer I could have asked it myself. But I don't accuse — I ask for more evidence or a better argument because if I'm forced to work with an LLM by proxy I am going to reflect the burden of dealing with one back to the author.

Espanso can be set up to make it easier, along with Powertoys on Windows and alt+shift+dash on the mac keyboard layout

As a Linux user... I should be embarrassed to not have set up a keybind for this. Not sure why I didn't think of it before!

Hello, felloe Linux user!

That being said, fyi, most Linux distros (or at least many!) have by default the shortcut `ctrl+shift+U` then the hex value of the Unicode character.

So, for example, the en dash is U+2013 and the em dash is U+2014, so you would press `ctrl+shift+U` then type in "2014" then space and it inputs it!

I use it all the time! It's very useful!

That's exactly what sentient AI would like us to believe.

As a professional writer, I can confirm that my editors love to sprinkle em dahses excessively on my work.

Personally, I'm more prone to excessive semicolon usage, which seems to aggravate editors.

I'm not a professional writer except of software, but both there and in my non-professional writing, I'm a lot more likely to use semicolons than em-dashes.

As an unprofessional writer, I assume this is the result of wanting to make the text “punchier.”

I'm just happy that LLMs don't seem particularly fond of semicolons; Their use should be reserved for the daring trailblazers that carve out their own path.

They can't figure out the rules either.

I like and use them often. Often someone will tell me I'm using them wrong and then explain 'the rule' which contradicts the rules as laid out by other 'experts'

Writers have used the em dash for centuries, certain members of internet forums and chatrooms have used them for two years. It's a tell.

In 2008-ish I was into web typography for if you may say so. We used to use special tools like https://www.artlebedev.ru/typograf/ to make text appear clear according to typography ideas. That included m-dashes. Amazing to see this subject surfacing again.

I am a millennial and I grew up with computers. I was taught that it was grammatically proper to use dashes, not hyphens. Microsoft Word (and later, Google Docs) made this trivially easy because you could type two hyphens (--) and it would replace it with an em-dash character. I rarely write in Word or Google Docs these days, but when I do I still do that double-hyphen shortcut.

I think the main reason people are noticing it now is because most writing has moved away from legacy tools like Word. Websites like Twitter don't do that character substitution, so it has become quite obvious when text is being pasted from another place...for example, AI generated content.

Humans also have great grammar, spelling and punctuate they're sentences corectally

Yes, people use the em dash. The point isn't the em dash itself. It's about U+2014. Yeah, in a book, or maybe a quality article, you'd type the em dash properly. But most of the time online? I write it as - or as --.

but that looks worse, it's horrible.

i have espanso set up to quick replace "-=" with — on desktop and on my phone i use futo keyboard, which has the aesthetically inspring em dash one hold and swipe on the h key away.

iOS, and probably plenty of other operating systems, converts that into dash automatically by default. 2x “-“ > “—“

So that’s just a bad signal

When you type -- on iOS or macOS it gets auto-converted to U+2014.

Wow, that's pretty cool. I've never used an Apple product, so I had no idea.

On iOS, you can also hold down the hyphen and get a popup menu with an em dash option (along with en dash and a bullet). On Macs, you can get an em dash with option-shift-hyphen.

I use em dashes constantly.

I've been a Mac user for years, where the em dash is a modified hyphen on the Mac keyboard. When I moved to primarily using PCs, the em dash alt-key combo was the first one I memorized (alt-0151).

I have all of it on my keyboard: neo-layout.org

LLMs have also made the word “crucial” suspect. They use that one constantly.

Personally, I’m very suspicious of any post that ends with “this was automatically generated by ChatGPT.“ Whenever I see this phrase, it strongly suggests it was written with AI.

That's why I still finish everything I write with "Sent from my iPhone 4 using Tapatalk" — just to reinforce that there's a human behind it.

Sent from my iPhone 4 using Tapatalk

Normal people (myself included) are not particularly good at writing and would never use an emdash. The average person won't even use semicolons because of confusion about how to use them and at least those have a dedicated key.

I'm sorry to the professional writers out there, but if I see an emdash in a piece of throw away writing (like a reddit or HN comment) I assume it's AI generated and I now immediately stop reading it.

Honestly em-dashes are simpler to use than other punctuation and sometimes come in handy when it's not clear what to use.

Why are they not in widespread use, though?

AACK!

I will admit I'm more like to use "--" and not bother converting it if not done automatically on quick forum posts. You can find examples in my post history. But I come across them all the time in written works.

Many of us who use em-dashes are so used to Word/etc correcting -- to — that it's just part of normal typing. I'm find if it renders either way, but I use -- in writing all the time.

One day this whole thing is going to read like the 1980's where you could tell if a latter was written by a "real" typist and not a word processor by the lack of correction liquid/tape.

But this is the problem, if you type double “-“ on iOS, it just turns it into an emdash. (“—“)

Because parentheticals—as aside, explanation, enumeration—aren't taught and we are left to learn them by example, and not many people care enough about writing style to pick up on them and want to use them. Ask most people who don't deal with technical writing about the Oxford comma and they likely won't care, if they know what it is in the first place.

Honestly — starting with the word honestly also seems like an LLM tell.

Then you're throwing out a lot of babies with your bathwater: https://www.gally.net/miscellaneous/hn-em-dash-user-leaderbo...

I'm not prolific enough to rank on this leaderboard, but I often use the em dash in comments/posts/texts and have for years—especially on my phone, since it's easiest to reach from a mobile keyboard.

> I'm sorry to the professional writers out there, but if I see an emdash in a piece of throw away writing (like a reddit or HN comment) I assume it's AI generated and I now immediately stop reading it.

All of this is distracting from the real question, which is:

Why do you care if it was AI generated?

As long as my comment reflects what I intended to say, you shouldn't care if I wrote it or the AI wrote it. Did it offend you in the past if an HN commenter used Grammarly to help craft the comment?

This is the literary equivalent of an ad hominem attach.

Because many people use LLMs to generate the thoughts and not just to tidy up grammar. And they don’t critically think about it.

I grew up ob forums where em-dashes and semicolons were fairly common—Harry Potter roleplay forums! In fact, that's how I learned most of my English; probably where some of my expression style developed.

Em-dashes are a great way to signal something—thought or extra context—were inject into normal sentences flow. It can make the text appear more conversational

I realise Harry Potter roleplaying forums are not really your "normal" crowd though lol

I’ve never used an em dash in my life—but after having AI rewrite a lot of my emails I’m starting to use it more often, though incorrectly most of the time.

Fixed that for you: _American_ writers have always used the em dash. In British English orthography, space-en dash-space is much more common.

space – en-dash – space?

  > Fixed that for you: _American_ writers

Reverting the fix. Em dashes are not exclusive to Americans (or English at all), they are used in other languages.

PR rejected, please add sufficient examples as unit tests to ensure we hit our code coverage.

I've recently enjoyed the German philosopher Max Stirner's liberal usage of em-dashes to add, at the end of his sentences — great emphasis.

> Before the sacred, people lose all sense of power and all confidence; they occupy a powerless and humble attitude toward it. And yet no thing is sacred of itself, but by my declaring it sacred, by my declaration, my judgment, my bending the knee; in short, by my — conscience.

---

In any case, the "en-dash", as you seem to suggest, is not equivalent to the "em-dash", but typically used to express ranges or contrast between two words, i.e. "1990–1992" or "push–pull configuration".

…in en-US. In en-GB, the en-dash surrounded by normal spaces, as per GP, is used where the US would use an em-dash flanked with hair spaces.

Edit: I dug out the original text of your translated phrase to see if it was Stirner’s or the translator’s use of em-dashes, and it looks like it was direct from Stirner: https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_sQ5RAAAAcAAJ_2/page/n89/m...

No.

In Robert Bringhurst's The Elements of Typographic style – pretty much a bible amongst typographers – he states:

We should “[u]se spaced en dashes – rather than close-set em dashes or spaced hyphens – to set off phrases.” Bringhurst then adds this devastating indictment:

The em dash is the nineteenth-century standard, still prescribed in many editorial style books, but the em dash is too long for use with the best text faces. Like the oversized space between sentences, it belongs to the padded and corseted aesthetic of Victorian typography.

I have no excuse: I read that book, and I thought I was quoting his advice from memory.

I break sentences up with a " - " all the time, just by using the minus sign (hyphen). I'm not bothering to use the correct, slightly longer dash. I'm British English speaker.

Ditto. Learned how to effectively use it in college - I'll never stop!

I use the em dash as appropriate, similar to semicolons and their ilk.

I don't think use of an em dash is indicative in itself of AI assistance, but rather, the change to using them. Did this person all of a sudden start using them? There are also other things to look at, like how certain bullet point lists have emphasis (for key phrases, being bold, when previously the author didn't do so, stylistically).

I write a lot (as a PM) - I've taken to using MacWhisper, which does local AI dictation, but also (at my configuration) sends it to a ChatGPT prompt first:

"You are a professional proofreader and editor. Your task is to refine and polish the given transcript as follows:

1. Correct any spelling errors.

2. Fix grammatical mistakes.

3. Improve punctuation where necessary.

4. Ensure consistent formatting.

5. Clarify ambiguous phrasing without changing the meaning.

6. If a sentence or paragraph is overly verbose and has more than negligible redundancy, lightly edit for brevity.

7. If the transcript contains a question, edit it for clarity but do not provide an answer.

Please return only the cleaned-up version of the transcript. Do not add any explanations or comments about your edits."

This is great. I get the benefits of pretty accurate transcription while getting a first pass at copyediting almost in real time. It did require me to make some tweaks to my dictation process (allowing it to "chew" on larger chunks to give better context to its editing), but it works very well.

I don’t think a change to using them is really all that strong of a signal, either. All the furor over using em-dashes as an AI detector might have gotten some folks to start using them.

I’m sort of surprised they haven’t always been widespread. They are great for making asides without losing energy-the voice in my head somehow has the same volume after an em-dash (unlike parentheses, which are quieter).

We were taught to use em dashes as reporters 25 years ago, and I use them all the time in personal writing.

The only time I used the em dash was when Microsoft word used to automatically add it to something I was typing. Usually it was formally typed stuff like essays and reports. I have never in my life used an em dash for anything else. Usually just a hyphen "-" at most.

Came here to say the same thing. Folks have been saying for a while "it's a tell tale sign of AI!" and I've been thinking - have people forgotten about Microsoft Word (and other word processors) automatically changing a hyphen to an em-dash?

Human writers with university degrees and who conform to the style guides where they’re free to use it.

Newspapers generally avoid it, even avoiding it completely in favour of commas. Properly wielding the n-dash or the m-dash requires training.

I use the em-dash quite often but tend to forget that I need to hit `-` twice to get it to appear in markdown. Used to be an oversight on my part but now I stick to it so people can tell I'm personally writing to them.

If you see text from me and it has an em-dash, it's 100% gen AI.

Yep, I am 46 and never knew the name of it until AI . Never used them

I'm 49 and they're my bread and butter. Em-dashes Army unite!!

surrounded by spaces... right?

Yeah, I do that. Maybe it's a reaction to badly kerned fonts I've encountered or maybe I just didn't notice the words were more or less joined by the em-dash. I guess I've been treating it as a long hyphen all this time.

Only after, not before.

Maybe the only cool thing to come out of this kooky obsession then: people are learning more about the wider world of punctuation.

I just thought it was cool when I learned that there were glyphs with names that indicated how wide they were.

And I believe the letter "x" is the standard for determining font height? Someone can correct me.

Anyone working on HTML 20 years ago was very familiar with — as a layout/typography tool. I think I used them before that but learned the name from typing it so much.

I never gave it much thought until I published my first book - then the editor insisted that I replace most of my parenthetical thoughts with emdash'ed inserts instead.

That's just the sort of thing an LLM would say.

I used em dash liberally in my PhD thesis, mainly because I learnt how to do them in TeX. Thankfully that was a long time before LLMs.

It seems to me that the article is missing the point somewhat. There's absolutely nothing wrong with the em-dash, but most people never use it (I don't think I've ever used it), because it doesn't appear on most standard keyboards.

If you encounter an em-dash in an online discussion, most likely someone went to extra effort to include it, or it was automatically inserted, possibly by an AI.

There are other signs that you're looking at AI-generated texts, like lists of three, a certain turn of phrase, or vague generalities, but those are easier for a human to type than an em-dash.

Arguably there are two types of emdash users: robots, and bookworms with English or journalism degrees who actually had to learn to use oddball punctuation in the typographically correct way.

Shift option dash.

I went to the "extra effort" of learning the (trivial) Mac keystroke to insert an emdash, probably about 10 years ago. Now I use it so often and so easily that I can't even recall which keys it is---it's pure muscle memory. (that three hyphens thing there is translated into an emdash by Pandoc, so it has become my go-to when I'm not typing on a Mac)

I expect most people who use emdashes in casual writing are people who have done a lot of reading and a substantial amount of writing too (professionally or otherwise), who are also tech-savvy enough to understand that it's possible to easily insert symbols that aren't printed on the keys of your keyboard. These are the people you're filtering out when you decide to use emdashes as your primary signal for deciding whether text was written by AI or not, and I think that's pretty stupid. In your haste to avoid content written by AIs you're filtering content written by people who care about writing, which leaves content written by people who don't, and content written by genAI systems told not to use emdashes, which you will naturally be far less suspicious of because you're fixated on the emdash thing.

I generally think it's terrible that genAI slop is displacing human writing, however useful I might LLMs for other tasks. In that, I probably agree with a lot of the people using emdashes as a negative signal. But the fact is that this widespread attitude toward emdashes can only accelerate that displacement, by tarring high quality human writing as suspicious while giving cleverly manipulated LLM output a pass.

"Point to the keys you press to enter the em dash". And smart quotes. My conjecture (and personal experience) is 99% of the occurrences of these characters is not due to pressing they corresponding keys, it is due to copy paste. So it should not be surprising or considered to be a personal attack on AI.

In most word processing software you just type "--", or "--- " to get an em-dash. It's not rocket science.

Apple users (both macOS and iOS) get curly quotes by default when they hit quote key.

They also get the em dash when typing '--'

FYI on a Mac, option - is an en dash, shift option - is an em dash.

Smart quotes are trickier, because the shortcuts are unfortunately unintuitive IMO. I forget what the original ones are, but they involve the [ and ] keys. I've actually remapped them using Karabiner-Elements so that option [ and ] are single quotes and shift option [ and ] double quotes.

Apple botched the quotes by putting ‘’ on [ and “” on ], rather than the open quotes on the open bracket and the close quotes on the close bracket.

(Personally I put the open quotes on ` and the close quotes on ', along with using Apple-style dash layout.)

Many devices and word processors will convert "--" into an em-dash. On longer posts, I often write in a word processor and then copy-paste to a text field.

On Android and iOS, you press and hold the "-" to get the "–" and "—" options.

On Mac, use opt + hyphen for "–" and opt + shift + hyphen for "—" (similar to other special characters).

On Linux you can enable the compose key and use it similar to MacOS (Compose+---).

It's not rocket science.

I set up espanso to replace -= with the em dash when I type because I like its aesthetic. I used to use the compose key, and on Windows I'd had an AHK shortcut for it. On Android GBoard has the em dash as an option which long pressing on the dash, while FUTO makes it available just from the letter g.

From `/usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose`:

    ...
    <Multi_key> <less> <apostrophe>     : "‘"   U2018 # LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK
    <Multi_key> <apostrophe> <less>     : "‘"   U2018 # LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK
    <Multi_key> <greater> <apostrophe>  : "’"   U2019 # RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK
    <Multi_key> <apostrophe> <greater>  : "’"   U2019 # RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK
    <Multi_key> <less> <quotedbl>       : "“"   U201c # LEFT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK
    <Multi_key> <quotedbl> <less>       : "“"   U201c # LEFT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK
    <Multi_key> <greater> <quotedbl>    : "”"   U201d # RIGHT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK
    <Multi_key> <quotedbl> <greater>    : "”"   U201d # RIGHT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK
    ...
    <Multi_key> <minus> <minus> <minus> : "—"   U2014 # EM DASH
    ...

I genuinely do not understand how compose-lacking ɪᴍᴇs continue to see use—so much more of the full unicode spec is trivially available to you… even quite intuitively.

All the best,

-HG

I have no idea how this is a real article that people are wasting their time on.

Of course people use the em-dash, and of course LLMs use them at least 10x-100x more than your average human writer. Also, they add nothing to writing, 99.8% people just use an en-dash when typing where an em-dash would be used in print, and absolutely nothing is lost. Some dickheads (like myself) have used a compose key (or similar) to use actual em-dashes in order to seem sophisticated online.

The only people who need the em-dash, as far as I know, are Spanish-language writers. As for LLM-shaming, isn't it more shameful when you publish an article that could easily be entirely written by LLM, but definitely wasn't, like this one?

edit: articles like this make me want to misuse flagging.

> "(like me) ... in order to seem sophisticated online."

Or like me, because they grew up in a different location, era, or career path where proper typography, spelling, grammar, and punctuation matter more than it does for most (print, web dev, advertising, etc) and now the use of that compose-key is just pure muscle-memory like high-speed "touch typing" is.

This article is attacking a strawman. Nobody was ever advocating for labeling all em dash usage as AI. Even the tweet they reference (not that random tweets ought to be taken as some sort of authoritative gauge of the current state of society...) does not claim that all em dash usage is AI.

In certain contexts, em dashes are perfectly natural and human. That being said, everyone has encountered articles and posts that read so obviously like AI, and in those contexts the presence of numerous em dashes is certainly an additional data point.

I use the em⸻dash.

This article completely misses the point from the start.

The reason em dashes are a giveaway for AI generated text is simply because there is no em dash key on the keyboard - only an en dash key. The dash I used in that last sentence was an en dash, not an em dash.

Some publishing applications (including Microsoft Word) will automatically convert en dashes to em dashes where appropriate. But most email apps, chat apps, online posts/comments, and practically any application not designed for writing actual printed publications will not do that conversion for you. And without a dedicated key, it is far too cumbersome for most people to bother. They will just leave it as an en dash.

So yes, the em dash is still a reliable indicator of AI-generated content in many contexts.

The keyboard key is usually a hyphen, not an en-dash.

But I agree that because LLMs are trained on public documents, and most of those are written in Microsoft Word which has auto-format enabled by default, that is probably the source of so many LLMs using them.

Almost nobody, relatively speaking, even knows they exist, let alone goes out of their way to figure out the ALT code combination to use them. Most people can’t get their, they’re, and there right.

> The keyboard key is usually a hyphen, not an en-dash.

You are right. Thanks for catching that.

No, its a hyphen you used. - vs – vs — (hyphen, en, em). Most android keyboards make typing the em dash easy, and there are plenty of ways to set it up on desktop

Mobile device keyboards typically make it easy to type — by holding down - for a moment.

It's so stupid that this even needs to be said.

And yet here we ware.

I'm glad the em dash is getting properly shit on these days, if for unrelated reasons. I've never liked it. I hate the stupid spacing rules around it. It never looks right to put no spaces around the em dash, and probably breaks all sorts of word-splitting code that's based on "\s". Where else does punctuation without spaces not mean a single word? Hyphens without spaces is a compound word: it counts as one. Imagine if the correct use of a colon was to not put spaces around it:like this. Do you like that? Of course not.

But I think worst of all it just gives me the fucking creeps, some uncanny-valley bullshit. I see hyphens a million times a day then out of nowhere comes this creepy slender-man looking motherfucker that's just a little bit too long than you'd expect or like, and is always touching all the letters around it when it shouldn't need to. It stands out looking like a weird print error... on my screen! Hopefully it keeps building a worse and worse reputation.

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