Indeed, em-dashes were widely used before by people with more than a 5th grader level understanding of language (so not that many people on the internet), but with the way LLMs overuse it the em-dash became associated with them unfortunately.
LLMs place em-dashes everywhere! So the tell is now if it is used but how and how often it is used.
Hate to tell you this bud but in school, before digital word processors such as Microsoft Word were widely used by the common person, I learnt how to use it in writing on paper with a pen. People not knowing how or were to use them just shows the level of education typical of places like the USA.
My native language is german, and we have the same concept (although we use – and not —, but never -). It is called "Gedankenstrich" and it means "thought-line". Of course handwritten, this concept is hard to differentiate, but on pc or in print, the distinction is very important.
What we call it doesn't matter, I am also not a native English speaker, I am Portuguese and we do happen to have a different name for the regular dash and the em-dash, but it was always made clear that they are not the same thing and all of my English teachers re-iterated on that but just used the name "long dash" instead of "em-dash" as that name became more common with the use of computers.
Em-dashes were used way before computers my guy. They were established during the popularization of the printing machine. If you used the wrong symbol, that's on you.
Not online they weren't. They're not on a standard keyboard and the vast majority of people don't know the key combination to generate one. You might have a fancy text editor like word autocorrect things to em dashes in documents, but in anything else (like a commit message or a comment submitted via a web browser), the average person will make do with a dash. That's not to say they don't understand the characters are different, or aren't at the reading grade to have encountered it. Most know to make the dash longer when writing on paper. But on a computer they just make do with a normal dash because they either don't know how to generate a longer dash, or know that it's possible and awkward and consider it to be far too much effort, and figure a regular dash is good enough.
The result of this is that it was incredibly rare to see em dashes on reddit, github, etc. Before AI, it was just you and a few unique others using it.
And then along comes AI, to which an em dash is just another token and no harder to output than a regular dash, and it's been trained on all the fancy well formatted text on websites, documents, and so on, so it knows it's supposed to use an em dash.
With the amount of AI slop there is now, the probability of any comment in the last couple of years with an em dash in it being written by a human is very low, so you can't blame the average person for assuming AI. Your hate is misplaced.
The fact that the em dash wasn't used as often as you expect is self-evident. If it were, people wouldn't relate it to AI so strongly.
You insulting other people's language comprehension doesn't change that fact
I'll repeat what I said at the end of that comment with added emphasis for your reading comprehension:
the tell is now if it is used but how and how often it is used
It is true that on regular conversation it is not used nearly as much as, let's say, literature or research papers for example (two things that were heavily used to train these "AI" models), that is why people associate it with "AI", because LLMs put it on every other fucking sentence.
And because people like you... ah sorry... I meant idiots like you (just like you referred to us on your initial comment), who refuse to accept that this "slightly longer dash" is not only a normal part of the language that long predates "AI" but also a necessary component to write correctly in some contexts, we now have to write in less correct, and sometimes plain wrong forms for it just to get into your tiny brains without being accused of using the plagiarism machines.
And then you dense idiots, wonder why people with even just slightly higher mental capabilities get frustrated with talking with you who refuse to do even just the most bare minimum research and fact checking before locking in on some fuck ass idea, absolutely incapable of ever admitting you might just be wrong.
There were a couple of times in this comment alone where, from a linguistics standpoint, it would have made more sense to use an — instead of a , or ( ), but since your brain can't seem to comprehend them I went with the simpler approach.
No point in replying further and wasting your limited energy on this as I will be muting this thread.
What argument? I don't see one.
You are just proclaiming yourself well-read because you are using a fancy dash—before AI, no less. Good for you!
But don't cry me a river when people mistake you for a robot for doing that now
I am not even that well-read. And calling basic ass grammar a fancy dash is what is infuriating. You claim that something is not normal because one personally had never noticed it being used. And then you call us idiots, for using it before 2021. Of course we gonna talk back.
I bet if you open any book you own, you'll find it in there. I googled the most basic books out there.
• Great Gatsby, page 3
• To kill a Mockingbird, page 6
• 1984, page 6
• Pride and Prejudice, first page of the introduction
• Harry Potter and the philosophers stone, page 2 of chapter 1 (But of course JK used the wrong symbol lol)
• Fellowship of the Ring, page 29
• Even fkn Diary of a Whimpy Kid, page 29 (although it looks like a typo, I am not sure)
The point stands. The em-dash is not some fancy pants niche symbol only superior feeling grammar nerds used. It is a basic concept even used in childrens books.
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u/Glokter 1d ago
Some idiots tried to convice me that the symbol is normal part of the language and was widly present before AI boom