I frequently am accused of using LLMs to write my prose, something that I not only eschew, but also believe is morally corrupt and intellectually dishonest.
I’m not above spellcheck, grammar checkers, or even LLM driven evaluation of articles, but my thoughts, word choices, and structure are always of my own design.
I use the em-dash where it is appropriate.
I find that people accusing writers of using AI typically disagree with the premise of the text, and use the “AI” character assault as a method of dehumanising the author and dismissal of their work. The assertion is very rarely made in good faith, but rather is used as a weak attempt to discredit an idea without actually refuting the premise or even examining the argument.
Shame on whoever argues in this way, it’s weak, unproductive, and intellectually lazy. It’s fine to disagree, but if you aren’t willing to act in good faith, just keep your thoughts to yourself. You’re only going to discredit your own point of view if you touch the keyboard.
For lack of an easy way to type it on my computer I tend to use parentheses (which effectively serve the same purpose) but will opt for an em dash more often when typing on my phone at the risk of bookish messages and notes.
Coworkers have emailed me before suggesting a certain course of action which I can tell is heavily influenced by an LLM. "I think we should X because Y" to which I just think "Is this really what you know and believe?". If I wanted an LLM to answer I could have asked it myself. But I don't accuse — I ask for more evidence or a better argument because if I'm forced to work with an LLM by proxy I am going to reflect the burden of dealing with one back to the author.
I use the em dash as appropriate, similar to semicolons and their ilk.
I don't think use of an em dash is indicative in itself of AI assistance, but rather, the change to using them. Did this person all of a sudden start using them? There are also other things to look at, like how certain bullet point lists have emphasis (for key phrases, being bold, when previously the author didn't do so, stylistically).
I write a lot (as a PM) - I've taken to using MacWhisper, which does local AI dictation, but also (at my configuration) sends it to a ChatGPT prompt first:
"You are a professional proofreader and editor. Your task is to refine and polish the given transcript as follows:
1. Correct any spelling errors.
2. Fix grammatical mistakes.
3. Improve punctuation where necessary.
4. Ensure consistent formatting.
5. Clarify ambiguous phrasing without changing the meaning.
6. If a sentence or paragraph is overly verbose and has more than negligible redundancy, lightly edit for brevity.
7. If the transcript contains a question, edit it for clarity but do not provide an answer.
Please return only the cleaned-up version of the transcript. Do not add any explanations or comments about your edits."
This is great. I get the benefits of pretty accurate transcription while getting a first pass at copyediting almost in real time. It did require me to make some tweaks to my dictation process (allowing it to "chew" on larger chunks to give better context to its editing), but it works very well.
I don’t think a change to using them is really all that strong of a signal, either. All the furor over using em-dashes as an AI detector might have gotten some folks to start using them.
I’m sort of surprised they haven’t always been widespread. They are great for making asides without losing energy-the voice in my head somehow has the same volume after an em-dash (unlike parentheses, which are quieter).
They say the models were trained on a bunch of books and that they learned the use of the dash from there. That's fine, no one is denying that humans have always used dashes in their books.
But where you would bet rarely see a dash would be something like a short product review, a YouTube comment or a WhatsApp message. In these contexts the dashes can and do seem out of place.
In 2008-ish I was into web typography for if you may say so. We used to use special tools like https://www.artlebedev.ru/typograf/ to make text appear clear according to typography ideas. That included m-dashes. Amazing to see this subject surfacing again.
I have no idea how this is a real article that people are wasting their time on.
Of course people use the em-dash, and of course LLMs use them at least 10x-100x more than your average human writer. Also, they add nothing to writing, 99.8% people just use an en-dash when typing where an em-dash would be used in print, and absolutely nothing is lost. Some dickheads (like myself) have used a compose key (or similar) to use actual em-dashes in order to seem sophisticated online.
The only people who need the em-dash, as far as I know, are Spanish-language writers. As for LLM-shaming, isn't it more shameful when you publish an article that could easily be entirely written by LLM, but definitely wasn't, like this one?
edit: articles like this make me want to misuse flagging.
> "(like me) ... in order to seem sophisticated online."
Or like me, because they grew up in a different location, era, or career path where proper typography, spelling, grammar, and punctuation matter more than it does for most (print, web dev, advertising, etc) and now the use of that compose-key is just pure muscle-memory like high-speed "touch typing" is.
It seems to me that the article is missing the point somewhat. There's absolutely nothing wrong with the em-dash, but most people never use it (I don't think I've ever used it), because it doesn't appear on most standard keyboards.
If you encounter an em-dash in an online discussion, most likely someone went to extra effort to include it, or it was automatically inserted, possibly by an AI.
There are other signs that you're looking at AI-generated texts, like lists of three, a certain turn of phrase, or vague generalities, but those are easier for a human to type than an em-dash.
I went to the "extra effort" of learning the (trivial) Mac keystroke to insert an emdash, probably about 10 years ago. Now I use it so often and so easily that I can't even recall which keys it is---it's pure muscle memory. (that three hyphens thing there is translated into an emdash by Pandoc, so it has become my go-to when I'm not typing on a Mac)
I expect most people who use emdashes in casual writing are people who have done a lot of reading and a substantial amount of writing too (professionally or otherwise), who are also tech-savvy enough to understand that it's possible to easily insert symbols that aren't printed on the keys of your keyboard. These are the people you're filtering out when you decide to use emdashes as your primary signal for deciding whether text was written by AI or not, and I think that's pretty stupid. In your haste to avoid content written by AIs you're filtering content written by people who care about writing, which leaves content written by people who don't, and content written by genAI systems told not to use emdashes, which you will naturally be far less suspicious of because you're fixated on the emdash thing.
I generally think it's terrible that genAI slop is displacing human writing, however useful I might LLMs for other tasks. In that, I probably agree with a lot of the people using emdashes as a negative signal. But the fact is that this widespread attitude toward emdashes can only accelerate that displacement, by tarring high quality human writing as suspicious while giving cleverly manipulated LLM output a pass.
"Point to the keys you press to enter the em dash". And smart quotes. My conjecture (and personal experience) is 99% of the occurrences of these characters is not due to pressing they corresponding keys, it is due to copy paste. So it should not be surprising or considered to be a personal attack on AI.
...
<Multi_key> <less> <apostrophe> : "‘" U2018 # LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK
<Multi_key> <apostrophe> <less> : "‘" U2018 # LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK
<Multi_key> <greater> <apostrophe> : "’" U2019 # RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK
<Multi_key> <apostrophe> <greater> : "’" U2019 # RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK
<Multi_key> <less> <quotedbl> : "“" U201c # LEFT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK
<Multi_key> <quotedbl> <less> : "“" U201c # LEFT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK
<Multi_key> <greater> <quotedbl> : "”" U201d # RIGHT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK
<Multi_key> <quotedbl> <greater> : "”" U201d # RIGHT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK
...
<Multi_key> <minus> <minus> <minus> : "—" U2014 # EM DASH
...
I genuinely do not understand how compose-lacking ɪᴍᴇs continue to see use—so much more of the full unicode spec is trivially available to you… even quite intuitively.
Yes, people use the em dash. The point isn't the em dash itself. It's about U+2014. Yeah, in a book, or maybe a quality article, you'd type the em dash properly. But most of the time online? I write it as - or as --.
I am fairly confident the majority of my LinkedIn network are not experienced writers and don't know what em dash means. All make regular posts with em dashes in them. Their excessive use, combined with a certain presentation style, tells me it's ChatGPT. When I ask them they confirm it's ChatGPT.
I wasn't using em dash, but appreciate looking it what seems pedantry. It's about semantics after all and having the right syntax is key. So I realized I'd like to be more thorough and use em dashes, en dashes and hyphens correctly.
My point is that if you/we treat things "statically" we're missing the point. It's not just tech that's changing, it's society changing as a result of tech (always has been).
I'm just happy that LLMs don't seem particularly fond of semicolons; Their use should be reserved for the daring trailblazers that carve out their own path.
I like and use them often. Often someone will tell me I'm using them wrong and then explain 'the rule' which contradicts the rules as laid out by other 'experts'
This article completely misses the point from the start.
The reason em dashes are a giveaway for AI generated text is simply because there is no em dash key on the keyboard - only an en dash key. The dash I used in that last sentence was an en dash, not an em dash.
Some publishing applications (including Microsoft Word) will automatically convert en dashes to em dashes where appropriate. But most email apps, chat apps, online posts/comments, and practically any application not designed for writing actual printed publications will not do that conversion for you. And without a dedicated key, it is far too cumbersome for most people to bother. They will just leave it as an en dash.
So yes, the em dash is still a reliable indicator of AI-generated content in many contexts.
Normal people (myself included) are not particularly good at writing and would never use an emdash. The average person won't even use semicolons because of confusion about how to use them and at least those have a dedicated key.
I'm sorry to the professional writers out there, but if I see an emdash in a piece of throw away writing (like a reddit or HN comment) I assume it's AI generated and I now immediately stop reading it.
I'm not prolific enough to rank on this leaderboard, but I often use the em dash in comments/posts/texts and have for years—especially on my phone, since it's easiest to reach from a mobile keyboard.
> I'm sorry to the professional writers out there, but if I see an emdash in a piece of throw away writing (like a reddit or HN comment) I assume it's AI generated and I now immediately stop reading it.
All of this is distracting from the real question, which is:
Why do you care if it was AI generated?
As long as my comment reflects what I intended to say, you shouldn't care if I wrote it or the AI wrote it. Did it offend you in the past if an HN commenter used Grammarly to help craft the comment?
This is the literary equivalent of an ad hominem attach.
I grew up ob forums where em-dashes and semicolons were fairly common—Harry Potter roleplay forums! In fact, that's how I learned most of my English; probably where some of my expression style developed.
Em-dashes are a great way to signal something—thought or extra context—were inject into normal sentences flow. It can make the text appear more conversational
I realise Harry Potter roleplaying forums are not really your "normal" crowd though lol
I'm glad the em dash is getting properly shit on these days, if for unrelated reasons. I've never liked it. I hate the stupid spacing rules around it. It never looks right to put no spaces around the em dash, and probably breaks all sorts of word-splitting code that's based on "\s". Where else does punctuation without spaces not mean a single word? Hyphens without spaces is a compound word: it counts as one. Imagine if the correct use of a colon was to not put spaces around it:like this. Do you like that? Of course not.
But I think worst of all it just gives me the fucking creeps, some uncanny-valley bullshit. I see hyphens a million times a day then out of nowhere comes this creepy slender-man looking motherfucker that's just a little bit too long than you'd expect or like, and is always touching all the letters around it when it shouldn't need to. It stands out looking like a weird print error... on my screen! Hopefully it keeps building a worse and worse reputation.
I’ve never used an em dash in my life—but after having AI rewrite a lot of my emails I’m starting to use it more often, though incorrectly most of the time.
> I speak of the elegant, elongated hyphen, the gentle friend and ally of all writers, used to set off a chunk of text within a sentence.
There's nothing elegant about a punctuation mark firmly glued to the words on either side, making a sequoia-sized typographic log that typically gets wrapped in its entirety to the next line, leaving a half mile or so of white space just hanging in space before the wrap.
If you're gonna use the em dash, make sure your software can break a line on either side of one.
This article is attacking a strawman. Nobody was ever advocating for labeling all em dash usage as AI. Even the tweet they reference (not that random tweets ought to be taken as some sort of authoritative gauge of the current state of society...) does not claim that all em dash usage is AI.
In certain contexts, em dashes are perfectly natural and human. That being said, everyone has encountered articles and posts that read so obviously like AI, and in those contexts the presence of numerous em dashes is certainly an additional data point.
I've been a Mac user for years, where the em dash is a modified hyphen on the Mac keyboard. When I moved to primarily using PCs, the em dash alt-key combo was the first one I memorized (alt-0151).
52 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 91.5 ms ] threadI frequently am accused of using LLMs to write my prose, something that I not only eschew, but also believe is morally corrupt and intellectually dishonest.
I’m not above spellcheck, grammar checkers, or even LLM driven evaluation of articles, but my thoughts, word choices, and structure are always of my own design.
I use the em-dash where it is appropriate.
I find that people accusing writers of using AI typically disagree with the premise of the text, and use the “AI” character assault as a method of dehumanising the author and dismissal of their work. The assertion is very rarely made in good faith, but rather is used as a weak attempt to discredit an idea without actually refuting the premise or even examining the argument.
Shame on whoever argues in this way, it’s weak, unproductive, and intellectually lazy. It’s fine to disagree, but if you aren’t willing to act in good faith, just keep your thoughts to yourself. You’re only going to discredit your own point of view if you touch the keyboard.
For lack of an easy way to type it on my computer I tend to use parentheses (which effectively serve the same purpose) but will opt for an em dash more often when typing on my phone at the risk of bookish messages and notes.
Coworkers have emailed me before suggesting a certain course of action which I can tell is heavily influenced by an LLM. "I think we should X because Y" to which I just think "Is this really what you know and believe?". If I wanted an LLM to answer I could have asked it myself. But I don't accuse — I ask for more evidence or a better argument because if I'm forced to work with an LLM by proxy I am going to reflect the burden of dealing with one back to the author.
I don't think use of an em dash is indicative in itself of AI assistance, but rather, the change to using them. Did this person all of a sudden start using them? There are also other things to look at, like how certain bullet point lists have emphasis (for key phrases, being bold, when previously the author didn't do so, stylistically).
I write a lot (as a PM) - I've taken to using MacWhisper, which does local AI dictation, but also (at my configuration) sends it to a ChatGPT prompt first:
"You are a professional proofreader and editor. Your task is to refine and polish the given transcript as follows:
1. Correct any spelling errors.
2. Fix grammatical mistakes.
3. Improve punctuation where necessary.
4. Ensure consistent formatting.
5. Clarify ambiguous phrasing without changing the meaning.
6. If a sentence or paragraph is overly verbose and has more than negligible redundancy, lightly edit for brevity.
7. If the transcript contains a question, edit it for clarity but do not provide an answer.
Please return only the cleaned-up version of the transcript. Do not add any explanations or comments about your edits."
This is great. I get the benefits of pretty accurate transcription while getting a first pass at copyediting almost in real time. It did require me to make some tweaks to my dictation process (allowing it to "chew" on larger chunks to give better context to its editing), but it works very well.
I’m sort of surprised they haven’t always been widespread. They are great for making asides without losing energy-the voice in my head somehow has the same volume after an em-dash (unlike parentheses, which are quieter).
Personally, I'm more prone to excessive semicolon usage, which seems to aggravate editors.
They say the models were trained on a bunch of books and that they learned the use of the dash from there. That's fine, no one is denying that humans have always used dashes in their books.
But where you would bet rarely see a dash would be something like a short product review, a YouTube comment or a WhatsApp message. In these contexts the dashes can and do seem out of place.
Of course people use the em-dash, and of course LLMs use them at least 10x-100x more than your average human writer. Also, they add nothing to writing, 99.8% people just use an en-dash when typing where an em-dash would be used in print, and absolutely nothing is lost. Some dickheads (like myself) have used a compose key (or similar) to use actual em-dashes in order to seem sophisticated online.
The only people who need the em-dash, as far as I know, are Spanish-language writers. As for LLM-shaming, isn't it more shameful when you publish an article that could easily be entirely written by LLM, but definitely wasn't, like this one?
edit: articles like this make me want to misuse flagging.
Or like me, because they grew up in a different location, era, or career path where proper typography, spelling, grammar, and punctuation matter more than it does for most (print, web dev, advertising, etc) and now the use of that compose-key is just pure muscle-memory like high-speed "touch typing" is.
And yet here we ware.
If you encounter an em-dash in an online discussion, most likely someone went to extra effort to include it, or it was automatically inserted, possibly by an AI.
There are other signs that you're looking at AI-generated texts, like lists of three, a certain turn of phrase, or vague generalities, but those are easier for a human to type than an em-dash.
I expect most people who use emdashes in casual writing are people who have done a lot of reading and a substantial amount of writing too (professionally or otherwise), who are also tech-savvy enough to understand that it's possible to easily insert symbols that aren't printed on the keys of your keyboard. These are the people you're filtering out when you decide to use emdashes as your primary signal for deciding whether text was written by AI or not, and I think that's pretty stupid. In your haste to avoid content written by AIs you're filtering content written by people who care about writing, which leaves content written by people who don't, and content written by genAI systems told not to use emdashes, which you will naturally be far less suspicious of because you're fixated on the emdash thing.
I generally think it's terrible that genAI slop is displacing human writing, however useful I might LLMs for other tasks. In that, I probably agree with a lot of the people using emdashes as a negative signal. But the fact is that this widespread attitude toward emdashes can only accelerate that displacement, by tarring high quality human writing as suspicious while giving cleverly manipulated LLM output a pass.
All the best,
-HG
So that’s just a bad signal
My point is that if you/we treat things "statically" we're missing the point. It's not just tech that's changing, it's society changing as a result of tech (always has been).
The reason em dashes are a giveaway for AI generated text is simply because there is no em dash key on the keyboard - only an en dash key. The dash I used in that last sentence was an en dash, not an em dash.
Some publishing applications (including Microsoft Word) will automatically convert en dashes to em dashes where appropriate. But most email apps, chat apps, online posts/comments, and practically any application not designed for writing actual printed publications will not do that conversion for you. And without a dedicated key, it is far too cumbersome for most people to bother. They will just leave it as an en dash.
So yes, the em dash is still a reliable indicator of AI-generated content in many contexts.
I'm sorry to the professional writers out there, but if I see an emdash in a piece of throw away writing (like a reddit or HN comment) I assume it's AI generated and I now immediately stop reading it.
I'm not prolific enough to rank on this leaderboard, but I often use the em dash in comments/posts/texts and have for years—especially on my phone, since it's easiest to reach from a mobile keyboard.
All of this is distracting from the real question, which is:
Why do you care if it was AI generated?
As long as my comment reflects what I intended to say, you shouldn't care if I wrote it or the AI wrote it. Did it offend you in the past if an HN commenter used Grammarly to help craft the comment?
This is the literary equivalent of an ad hominem attach.
Em-dashes are a great way to signal something—thought or extra context—were inject into normal sentences flow. It can make the text appear more conversational
I realise Harry Potter roleplaying forums are not really your "normal" crowd though lol
But I think worst of all it just gives me the fucking creeps, some uncanny-valley bullshit. I see hyphens a million times a day then out of nowhere comes this creepy slender-man looking motherfucker that's just a little bit too long than you'd expect or like, and is always touching all the letters around it when it shouldn't need to. It stands out looking like a weird print error... on my screen! Hopefully it keeps building a worse and worse reputation.
There's nothing elegant about a punctuation mark firmly glued to the words on either side, making a sequoia-sized typographic log that typically gets wrapped in its entirety to the next line, leaving a half mile or so of white space just hanging in space before the wrap.
If you're gonna use the em dash, make sure your software can break a line on either side of one.
In certain contexts, em dashes are perfectly natural and human. That being said, everyone has encountered articles and posts that read so obviously like AI, and in those contexts the presence of numerous em dashes is certainly an additional data point.
I've been a Mac user for years, where the em dash is a modified hyphen on the Mac keyboard. When I moved to primarily using PCs, the em dash alt-key combo was the first one I memorized (alt-0151).