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I hate that my first move when I see an em dash has become to check the old posts of the author to check whether it's a new "habit" of them.

sigh skip

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I used to use em-dashes all the time, same with semicolons, in my academic writing. I love obscure punctuation rules (yes I'm a loser). I've stopped using most of them as AI advanced. Whilst I have a back catalogue of work using them it just wasn't worth the risk of having my work questioned. I'm sad about this AI ruins all the good stuff!

Remarkably, I found a blog where I thought "This sounds like AI" but I wasn't sure, so I went to their back catalogue from decades ago, and the writing was similar so I gave them a pass.

Then I checked the internet archive.

They had replaced all their back catalogue with AI slop.

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