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Comment by 1matin | Hacker News Reader

Whenever you see a lot of long dashes (—) in a writing, there's a high chance Claude has written it.

Perhaps – but it's a useful grammatical construct in everyday use, handy for structuring sentences.

And with the prevalence of AI, it rubs off on the smelly humans, who also find it useful and use it more as a result. (I used an en dash here instead of an em one – also valid, easier to type, and shorter).

Nah. I NEVER say the dash pre-AI, at least in commoners writings. Maybe in some books etc. The dash you read today is 99.9% AI generated.

On the rare occasions I used Word to write things in the past, it would replace dashes with em-dash.

I normally use dashes when writing, never bothered myself with writing an em-dash properly otherwise.

Where do you think the LLMs got the emdash from? When I worked as a magazine editor we took good care to discern ndash and emdash in printing. In Germany it is a Bindestrich (which links words, hence "bind") and Gedankenstrich (this is where you have a pause in thinking and continue the sentence afterwards).

Like i said, the dash IS a thing, and only in practice used by "experienced writers", common folk NEVER use it. LLMs stole all the books, so obviously the AI spits out dashed like there is no tomorrow.

You cant argue about this, just looking at github, i never saw dashes used pre AI. Today you see a dashes in code comments, PRs, issues etc EVERY time. Its all AI generated.

I've used it extensively in English due to learning the language through a lot of older books - but I've never bothered to actually pull out the emdash, I would hope people can see that I'm not trying to subtract one sentence from the other.

This heuristic is commonly believed — and expressed on this website — but is idiotic. Plenty of people have known how to use em dashes when writing on a computer since the 1980s. (This was true even before UTF-8 was invented to make extended characters work across platforms; instead of ⌘⇧-hyphen, we'd just type "--" to approximate it.)

The reason LLMs tend to use a lot of em dashes is that the human-authored texts they were trained on used a lot of em dashes.

This is untrue and a naive understanding of modern model training.

Opus 5 does not speak like a normal, average, or common English user. For example, it says “stated plainly” or “worth stating plainly” (two very uncommon English phrases) every two or three responses.

> Plenty of people have known how to use em dashes

Plenty? I don't think it's that many. And knowing how to use them, doesn't mean they would actually use them. In my experience, em dashes are mainly found in academic literature. Chances that an em dash in a new text comes from an LLM are pretty high.

Your use of it is dubious, I think. Commas would serve equally well --or better-- since it's a simple conjunction, not an interjection.

Markdown is ubiquitous in the kinds of places Hacker News visitors also tend to visit, like GitHub, various ticketing and project management systems like Jira, note takers like Obsidian and Notion (or an approximation of Markdown).

I've used `--` for years in place of an em-dash, which markdown renders as an actual em-dash.

The text also includes en-dashes, I struggle to believe that someone actually manually typed those.

I have started adding a footnote superscript to my first use of an emdash in any document. The footnote is just:

"1. All emdashes on this page were written by me."

In this case, the emdashes are just tip of the iceberg. The writing is so Claude that it’s painful to read (and in fact I stopped reading to save my mental health).

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