Not only am I losing my livelihood to AI – now it's stealing my em dashes too (theguardian.com)

Yeah, lately I've found myself editing out my em-dashes, because otherwise people may think it's an LLM writing, not me.

Sigh.

I understand getting triggered by em dashes in a comment section - nobody uses them like that, right? But in an editorial piece? That's where you expect to see them. At least that's what I thought...

One more reason unformatted text is superior -- the double dash doesn't get autocorrected into an em dash.

This is exactly the kind of filler article that AI can replace.

I don't get the "em dash = AI" thing. MS Word and iOS have been autocorrecting em dashes for years now.

Right? Am I the crazy one?

So it is not AI who forces the author to not use em dashes, but AI haters.

This is silly. AI generated pieces will have em dashes edited out too.

My protest is to use em dashes more. Why not? They’re great. Who cares if AI also uses them.

I suppose my writing is safe for a bit longer; I like my semicolons.

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> Em dashes—often used to connect explanatory phrases, and so named because they’re the width of your average lowercase ‘m’

I did not know that. I just memorized en dash was shorter in length than em dash. If it also corresponds to an "n" length, I'll be delighted.

Ok... that title should have a comma, not an em dash. If you're going to complain about having them being removed, you have to use them properly at least.

And then " It seems I have two choices now—keep using em dashes with a sort of stubborn, curmudgeonly pride until all my clients stop exchanging money for words, or start writing incredibly long run-on sentences, like this, with commas all over the place … and maybe ellipses too; ideas connected by semicolons. "

That should be a colon after "two choices". (There's also clearly more than two options, one of which does not involve run-on sentences with his otherwise poor grammar. James seems like a shitty prose crafter if he's unable to avoid run-ons.)

As a non-native English speaker, I will not be mistaken as AI for a while. Occasionally, I will introduce a small typo just to make sure people don;t think this is AI.

Just blatant aicism at this point. How else are AI supposed to speak? In blocky digital fonts only?

I’m an academic—LLM-detectors can pry the em dashes from my cold dead hands.

I've started using em dashes in—among other places—my HN posts, just to spite the clankers.

Or is this just Wintermute manipulating my behaviors for its own ends?

I guess you’ll just have to find a different status signal.

I didn't even know the em dash or how to produce them until now! FYI: in a Mac, you use Shit + Option + - (the minus) to create the em dash.

I don't know if it's language or a different era, but I've not really used an em dash. I just use a dash. - versus -- and I did not really start seeing it until LLM's.

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Where did people in this thread learn to use em dashes? I feel like my English teachers failed me.

Your em dashes never added any extra information to 99.999% of readers. No one cares and neither should you.

i have started to reclaim my em dashes by adding spaces around them. if you notice most AI text tacks them on right next to the sentence fragment.

add surrounding spaces to the dash !

it's grammatically correct (but typically uncommon). visually looks more balanced to boot!

This em dash thing has become a meme of sorts, and a pain for anyone who actually writes for a living and/or uses iOS/macOS and it’s automatic formatting.