Comment by _alternator_ 13 hours ago
Wait—do people here really think the em dash was nonexistent before LLMs? It’s widely used by people like me who care about writing style. The reason LLMs use it is because they reflect care and concern about writing style.
Shouldn't a double dash result in an en dash and only a triple in an em dash?
No, people think humans use it a lot less often than AI, because it’s true. Especially for casual writing.
The contrast might become even greater because some humans that did use them have stopped to avoid false accusations.
Nobody ever said that they were nonexistent before LLMs. When you are investigating and trying to determine if something is AI generated they are the number one indicator.
So if you're being accused of just spewing AI, then double down and spew what looks EVEN MORE like AI. What are you even doing?
Number one indicator? A single punctuation mark that's trivial to make on most keyboards (option-dash on macOS). And generally people who write software are extra fixated on punctuation for obvious reasons: missing semi-colons break your build, etc. Maybe in some other niche message board people will use dash and em dash interchangeably, but here?
Also, if the a single character is how you're red-flagging LLM output, do you know how easy it is to avoid? I didn't use it here at all, but how do you know I didn't run this through some slop-machine to tighten my prose? It's really low-effort take to say "just avoid em dashes so we know you're not an AI".
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the-em-dash-responds-to-...
Yes, number one indicator. Yes, of course you can go through the output and take out all of the em-dashes. Then the number one indicator will obviously not work.
Yeah, people do seem to think that em dashes are an indicator of GenAI. I have been accused of using AI to write my posts on a forum, precisely because of em dashes. That's how I found out about that particular sniff test people use.
Hasn't made me change the way I write, though. Especially because I never actually type an em dash character myself. Back when I started using computers, we only had ASCII, so I got used to writing with double dashes. Nowadays, a lot of software is smart enough to convert a double dash into an em dash. Discourse does that and that's how I ended up being accused of being an AI bot.