Why em dashes specifically? Why is THAT what we blame on AI?
Apologies, this is a rant. Please ignore if you are an em dash fan and know that I am not ranting at you, but at its creator.
As someone who has had to deal with comparing text output via automated tests, this thread hurts. I hate Em Dashes and whoever invented them with a burning passion. They make text comparison a nightmare.
“Let’s invent a character that looks exactly like a slightly longer hyphen, but isn’t!” Brilliant. Well done.
Why not just make the hyphen longer instead so people can just type it, like they do with every other character? Nope, instead, let’s invent a different character that can only be typed if you know the Unicode ID.
Even worse is the fact that there are also En Dashes. Because we definitely needed both and couldn’t just type multiple consecutive hyphens to make the line longer…
The worst part is that if you are writing physically, and you’re not a robot, there is no way to distinguish between these at all; they are all just hyphens.
I just use HTML entities to type en and em dashes. — -> — – -> –
Oh nice Lemmy supports these entities.
On Typst its
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People have told me for most of my life to talk and write “more normal” so that they wouldn’t have to use a dictionary or think for more than a second about what they’re reading — this is just the latest instance of them looking for a shortcut to disregard anything they don’t immediately understand.
Fuck ‘em.
Mostly afraid of people realizing I’m an academic. Em-dashes are a dead giveaway.
🤔
My word processor automatically replaces hyphens with em dashes. Doesn’t yours?
Sometimes they’ll do it, sometimes they won’t. Im not actually sure what the difference is - im hella sure nobody im talking with does either. Screw it.
Because they fucking stole it from me! I’ll be damned if I let a machine–intelligent or not–force me into changing the way I, an individual, choose to express myself in my own language!
No, but it pisses me off as an indie author. I adore em-dashes. Not my fault stupid people who don’t read have never seen them before outside of their crappy AI.
I use em all the time, for no particular reason either. I just like how they look. I didn’t realise this was a AI detection metric until recently.
No, I’m not afraid. I’ve been using me-dashes for decades now, and I won’t stop just because some idiots flood the streets with worthless AI junk that happens to copy long-established practices in text formatting.
Silly OP. Humans don’t use em dashes.
At most, their word processor magically turns regular dashes into em dashes and they don’t care enough to change it back.
First I’ve heard of em dashes being an “AI” thing. Aren’t LLMs trained on human-generated text? They wouldn’t be outputting em dashes if humans didn’t also output em dashes.
I heard of it from this video
It’s just one of several tells. Although you can’t really rely on anything. Just like “badly-drawn hands” is less likely to show up now.
Once I heard this, I had to learn how to type them, btw!
I use em dashes – the entry into any word processor is two dashes, just tell it not to autocorrect to an em-dash.
Default behaviour for Word is to auto correct hyphens to em dashes. It has annoyed me for years.
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I didn’t know about em dashes, it was skipped in all my classes decades ago and I just thought the occasional long dash was a font thing.
I’m not used to using them and don’t plan to start
Very no.
