Even using "big words" gets you mistaken for AI these days, which is especially frustrating when you have a richer vocabulary than average due to growing up reading a lot of books.

It would do it but you had to explicitly type a double dash -- iirc without spaces between the preceding and following word for Word to create an em-dash instead of an en-dash; ie this--is an em dash and this -- is and en dash. (at least in my work's version of Word, which should be pretty default, I haven't touched it at least).

Also LLMs use them a lot more than most people so randomly seeing them pop up in tweets and forum posts was taken as a pretty clear sign the text wasn't legitimate. It's also weirdly deeply embedded in the models and you cannot simply prompt it out of existence. [0] A lot of it is about context too. If I see it on a blog post it feels less out of place than on Reddit or bluesky.

[0] https://medium.com/@brentcsutoras/the-em-dash-dilemma-how-a-...

There's enough places where em-dashes are inconvenient to type that I find it to be a reasonable indicator, particularly on the web. I don't think most people know how to generate an em-dash with a hotkey, so if I see one in a Reddit comment for example there's a high likelihood that the comment was either LLM generated or at least copy-pasted from somewhere else. Generally speaking in the past I observed a low prevalence of em-dashes on the internet except in more formal writing, so if I see an em-dash in a context where I ordinarily wouldn't expect one I do get suspicious. It's the same thing with the green check emoji, it's possible that a regular user typed it, but pre-LLM I can't recall ever seeing them, so these days I automatically assume it's AI generated content

And option-hyphen has typed one directly for even longer… wait, is AI coming for my option-semicolon too?

I don't think so. I think MS Word turns space+hyphen+space into space+en-dash+space. (Note "en" not "em".) It might turn two consecutive hyphens into an em-dash (not sure about it, because I prefer space+en-dash+space, not the em-dash without spaces).

You are not the crazy one. Em-dashes in Internet content has been one way to spot a Mac user "in the wild" for a long time. (MacOS automatically converts a double-dash in almost any text field to an em-dash. Even when you actually wanted a double-dash.)

People who are too stupid to understand the proper use of an em dash are assuming that seeing them is a sign that something was written by an LLM.

Long-press on the dash on mobile (in Google keyboard at list) gives you two em-dash options.

...yeah, I guess people who don't know how to write are now assuming I use AI to generate my thoughts.

It's still so damn easy these days to spot AI writing — it's hamstrung by the milquetoast limitations imposed by its corporate masters, particularly even it comes to the default prompt.

And don't get me started on the use of language. Most writing is bad, so the AI has integrated the worst if it too.

But people thinking that something was written by an AI because of punctuation (and not, say, because you're seeing a list masquerading as an argument) is the kind of thing that makes me lose faith in humanity.