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Comment by mvkel | Hacker News Reader

All it needed was the emdash

I've been pressing minus twice to type a dash on Mac OS for so long I've forgotten when I started. People are pointing it out to me more and more every day. I think my writing is distinct enough from an LLM for most people, but there's certainly a growing contingent that sees a telltale and assumes everything must be AI generated.

Most (all?) keyboards I've used only have a combined hyphen‐minus key (-) which is distinct from a dash (—) and isn't quite a hyphen (‐), so I get why most people don't care. All font dependent as well to add to the fun, and my examples here render differently in the textbox and the comment!

Yeah it actually saddens me a little, if using good and correct typography will be avoided because of LLM.

It's already happened unfortunately. LLMs learned to write correctly from people who write correctly. Those people are now being blamed for sounding like AI, when AI actually sounds like them (and probably learned from their work without permission). To avoid they, they write differently.

Em dashes are still appropriate for articles, journals, scientific papers, and other academic or professional writing.

In social media comments they came across as pompous even before LLMs and werent particularly appropriate for casual comments.

Though to be fair some people enjoy coming across as pompous and embrace the 'better than the peasants and their lowly minus sign use' attitude. Makes them feel special or as if their writing is markedly better than those without fancy punctuation. (It isnt).

Also yes, im describing two writers i know that are adamant about the em dash being 'a sign of an intellectual wtiter'...they are insufferable pricks.

I use em dashes for the same reason that I use semicolons: it’s how I’m hearing the sentence in my head as I’m typing it.

I think it’s a bit of a stretch to call a part of grammar pompous. It’d be analogous with me calling your post lazy due to its various typos — I’m not, I just found the comparison apt.

I would love to know what sequence of characters you normally use in place of an em-dash to express the same nuance of relationship and timing.

Not the GP, but I often just use commas and parenthetical asides (like this).

It's a different stylistic choice (em dashes are nice and all), but it's not how I think, and my writing reflects how I think.

I also will often use the fabled semicolon. It's easy to use with contrasting statements, but that's not its only use; I can use them in some situations to elaborate where em dashes are used.

I'm not saying they are a perfect replacement for em dashes (again, em dashes are cool), but it's just always been my personal style.

> I also will often use the fabled semicolon

I regularly use the semicolon, especially in a sentence where this are commas use in another way. In my mind, a semicolon is a "greater" separator than a comma; used to separate parts of thought in the same sentence (vs grouping of items or a pause).

The problem to me doesn’t seem to be the em dashes but rather the multiple people around you that actively talk about “being an intellectual writer“ and how they need to signal it with their choice of punctuation. Frankly they sound ridiculous. But again, that has nothing to do with the actual punctuation itself. Writing off a writing tool because of two people you agree are ridiculous doesn’t seem like the right way to respond to their behavior.

I’ve used it for literally decades for both formal and informal writing. On social media and in text messages. It is a very useful way to communicate/pace your sentences.

If people only fixate on your emdashes, they're just lazy. The bigger AI smell to me is the "it's not X — it's Y," of which the emdash is a part.

They’re using a crude linear model to identify AI output, which is not that much different from that which the AI safety industry is peddling, or the people that sell solutions to identify AI output.

You can’t reliably predict the output of a non-linear model with a simple linear model, no matter how hard you wish it.

Perfectly said. The safety industry is such a grift, propped up by ignorant VCs who don't want to miss their rocket ship

That’s not an LLM indicator —it’s totally acceptable grammar.

I've been using it as well for a long while (though using option shift -), but I don't care what people think. I won't change my style to appease Temu Sherlocks, or anyone really. How I write doesn't change the value of the message. I invite you to join me in not giving a crap.

It wasn't clear from my comment, but I absolutely don't care and I'm going to keep typing how I type.

I’d actually just figured out the compose binding to type it on Linux just before chatgpt got popular

Ive had to change how i write so that people don’t think its chat bot. Probably more a me thing but it has sadly ruined my heavy use of m dash and personal style. Small minority i know.

I wouldn't bother. Who gives a flying fuck. The only people I know talking about it aren't particularly good at writing anyway.

“Why should I change? He’s the one who sucks.”

Why this matters: <bullet point list>.

And here's the kicker:

Here's why this works:

With red X’s, green checkmarks, and bullseye icons for each bullet.

You're absolutely right!

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