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Comment by dpark | Hacker News Reader

I find the em dash thing weird as well. I bunch of people who didn’t know what an em dash was a couple of years ago decided that it’s a signature LLM move.

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It depends where you find it. If it's a comment, it's highly unlikely it would include careful punctuation such as semicolons, whereas for em-dash you need to do something extra as it's not available on the keyboard as a single keystroke by default, so everybody is using a hyphen instead of em-dash or en-dash.

However, a magazine article, or even a blog where the author cares might include all: printer quotes instead of straight ones, en/em dashes, ellipsis as as single character and many more. If suddenly half of the web is filled with shallow content dressed up in certain styling, people are right to feel something is not right.

> whereas for em-dash you need to do something extra

OPT+SHIFT+- on macOS. It's no more difficult to type than a lot of other punctuation/common symbols.

And on iOS it’s a long-press on the hyphen. It’s not inconvenient at all when you’re used to using them.

OK, that macOS. On Windows you had to remember the arcane Numpad combination (provided you had a numeric keyboard). That makes it uneven - the hyphen is just universal.

Very few humans go to the effort of using a true em dash in Internet comments (almost everyone just uses a hyphen), so it's a pretty good LLM indicator when paired with a certain writing style.

So are typos such five times five is thirty—five.

A good reason to also start using em dashes wherever inappropriate.

Until LLMs came around, I rarely saw other people use interrupting/parenthetical clauses at all, em dash or not. Kind of the same with semi-colons even. Or bold or subtle italics.

I’ve always enjoyed the style that em dashes and semi-colons add to a piece of writing and it was what made me start using them. It was always notable to me when I noticed them in someone’s else’s writing, which was always rare.

But definitely not none— I use them in comments all the time, and have for decades. I find asinine observations conveyed with repetitive, circular wording to be a better indicator.

It just contrasts expectations of the unwashed masses with more professional writing.

If most people are used to reading social media and texts from their friends and maybe subtitles for movies, an em dash is practically never going to appear, and so when everyone and their dog start using them, well, it’s obvious something is up.

Whereas the more literate individual used to consuming writing for pleasure will have seen them regularly, and may even have employed them while writing.

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