Did AI raise awareness of Em-dashes, causing more people to use them organically?
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My wife is a journalist and has always loved them.
Now she's been accused of using AI for her pieces.
Oh well.
> Now she's been accused of using AI for her pieces.
Read the observation that AI was (presumably) trained on the 'best' (or at least 'quality') writing, and so if good writers tended to use em-dashes, it should not be surprising that AI generates text with it.
But, if one's personal style included using them, you should continue to do so because why should you dial down your own voice just because someone else may be mimicking it?
em-dashes help flow ideas better than other means. For whatever reason, it's easier to process in my brain a comment with an em-dash rather than trying to split the idea into separate succinct sentences.
You can do small succinct sentences, but style-wise it sucks for longer passages.
In my case, yes. I have never used AI to write any prose (including HN comments), and I never will. But I certainly started using them more often since the ChatGPT era began, purely through osmosis. I'm not exactly proud of that, but there you have it.
I use the double dash.
This gets corrected to an emdash.
I get annoyed and put the double dash back in.
Sometimes swearing a little or grumbling “HEY. I typed what I typed” at it helps a little.
I don’t even know how many times in 20-30+ years I’ve checked some box in system or program preferences begging it to knock that off.
This is the real reason I already loathe and avoid the emdash (nitpicking over a personal stylistic preference I won’t relent on even if I’m wrong) but I can’t be the only one this happens to.
Getting piled on and called “AI” really doesn’t ease my distaste for it, but .. do people.. not write enough to understand that it brute forces its way into human copy as well?
and yes. phone posting on HN. will insert them. to my dismay.
The other one that ticks me off endlessly but I’ve finally said to hell with it and just let it go?
Turning " into “.
(Writer. Not a very good one and I’m not here to steer anyone to that drivel. But at least I’m a human one.)
I know I did. I don't want eloquent punctuation to fall exclusively to the clankers.
I do use fewer em-dashes now, but only because I spend more time on Linux, where my habitual Windows trick of alt + 0151 no longer works.
Press Ctrl+Shift+U to enter Unicode entry mode in GTK controls, then enter the code point for the em dash, 2014. That will produce '—'.
Although I still prefer the traditional ASCII double-dash -- easier to type, and less potential for character encoding issues. Also, LLMs don't seem to use it at all.
AI raised awareness of em-dashes among people who didn't/don't read much, especially the kind of long-form writing that LLMs have been trained on. Treating em-dashes as a tell of LLM output is a form of unintentional "vice signalling".
I think it's both. People started writing AI comments and also started using em-dashes. However when my former boss would write emails with AI he would add intentional typos and remove all dashes.
For my part, editing Wikipedia raised my awareness of the different types of dashes, and when to use them appropriately. Unfortunately, my Chromebook is not so forthcoming in ease of input.
If anything I use them _less_ now thanks to this whole thing.
Yes. Defanging smart quotes, double-dashing em's, spelling out numbers, and swearing off emojis. Next up, double-spaced sentences.
HTML still collapses multiple spaces, doesn't it? Does HN go out of its way to add an nbsp glyph? Typing this post the original way I learned to type, with two spaces after the end of each sentence, to see if it renders that way. Here we go!
(Incidentally, I love that backlash against LLM writing has more people developing as much of an allergy to emojis and content-marketing- and personal-branding-style writing as I've long had)
I guess you have to choose now whether to be accused of being a Clanker or a Boomer.
A reminder that according to the HN guidelines, there's no need to use underscores or other annotations to emphasize words.
I'm from the Myspace/MSN generation, old habits die hard.
I don't think my phone keyboard even has one to type
Two dashes seems to collapse into an em-dash using my iPhone keyboard.
Long press on - on both iOS and android (Gboard)
> Long press on - on both iOS and android (Gboard)
Depending on the text area you are typing into, if you type two hyphens/minuses right after each other (no spaces), Apple systems often translate them to an em-dash (kind of mimicking (La)TeX).
(If you don't want the em-dash, hit <cmd-z> with macOS to undo that auto-conversion.)
Y'all on Android should be using Unexpected Keyboard, where it's Compose - - -.
did not know that
Unconsciously and consciously yes, and this new awareness means others are now consciously avoiding the use of them so their writing is less likely to be perceived as AI generated junk
Surely yes, but also surely neglibly compared to the rise of slop being posted. Sometimes things are what they seem!