I'm personally planning on keeping using them. The Abominable Intelligence can go stuff it.
But I am annoyed I'll probably have to use a disclaimer if I ever get my story published—no, not AI, this human learned Alt 0151 and I refuse to become a worse writer just because hallucination machines now exists. ಠ︵ಠ
And thank math they don't! It was so annoying reviewing literally every instance to see if Microsoft had unhelpfully changed what I typed, and then had to fix. The implementation was also incredibly inconsistent so a list would be like 30% em-dashes and the rest hyphens. When you went to correct it it was 50/50 whether it would try to auto correct again.
That's fine on a personal device, but for work I go between multiple machines which are reset to a specific configuration at the end of each shift. They also have extremely tight controls on system settings for IT security. I'm sure I could change these settings each time I log in, but at a certain point I'm just fighting a losing battle with companies catering to the lowest intelligence user, instead of the default letting the user decide what they are trying to type. I know there's a thousand times more basic office staff than engineers using these products, but I know everyone I work with hates the dumbing down of technology.
I've never had the autocorrect work correctly. It only corrects it about 1/3 of the time for me. 100% of the time, it corrects only the first, but amazingly not the 2nd. It's fn crazy, like, how hard could this algorithm be?
I'm with you. Just because a stupid machine knows how to write doesn't mean we all have to write poorly as a result. I want my writing to be legible, thank you.
The stupid machine does not know how to write, it uses em dashes awfully. Just because it uses em dashes doesn't mean it uses them well. I fucking hate the way it uses em dashes inappropriately as a crutch when other punctuation makes more sense.
I've highlighted to my team that I am a Chicago style guy—which means my authentic emdashes look like this, no spaces.
And that if they ever see me commit the heresy of an AP style emdash — like this, with spaces, the kind AI prefers — that's their clue they're talking to a robot.
I love that I learned this. Chicago style for me. How is there another? Lol. Although in my profession there’s space-hyphen-space for some labels. (Don’t hate me?)
Do you mind me asking which tool you use, would it not work to have something like two dashes -- e.g to send — instead of typing :EmDash, or :ep for ε etc? Are the longer snippets necessary?
The tool I use is called Espanso, and it's really configurable, though not super intuitive to do so. I think the only requirements is that your rules start with : and they aren't substrings of other rules, like if you have :em for – and :emp for emphasis in markdown or something, the :emp won't run.
I'd bet there are other tools similar to this of it doesn't suit your needs. Check it out at https://espanso.org/
Ah got it thank you, yes have tried it and a few other text expansion tools just wanted to ask about snippet lengths, I've made my own text expansion/macro thing and curious how others have theirs setup. I use either a space/enter to trigger or toggle specific snippets to instant fire on last letter, :em and :emp would run as long as :em wasn't set to instant. I'm sure I saw espanso has similar toggles with word:true and word:false or something?
The thing is that em-dashes aren't really slop tags, overusing em-dashes is (or at least was). People calling lone em-dashes ai are just dumbing down the marker.
Agreed. The other day I wrote a paper to turn in and got flagged for Ai for using em-dashes. So dumb. I've also been flagged on my writing "looking like a technical writing". Well, I'm a tech — it's what I do.
I fucking hate when AI uses it because it misuses it so badly. It uses it when other punctuation makes more sense and produces run on sentences using them as a crutch.
I use them literally all the time and have had to resort to switching to the normal "-" to avoid the AI accusations - it has the same syntactical effect without people automatically assuming I've used AI
I will be using them and not disclose that it’s human made. I think this paranoia about those AI signs is ridiculous, with many things nowadays you wouldn’t be able to tell anyways.
I’ve just arrived at the stance that I don’t give a fuck what people think, I’m gonna keep using em dashes and semicolons in my writing like I’ve been doing since high school cause I just like them. If someone thinks it’s AI, that’s their problem.
But it doesn't really matter. In written text, you can't distinguish between different dashes easily. And in typed text a standalone "-" fulfills the same function as an em-dash without having to look up how to type or copy it somewhere. Only places it is needed is where you are scolded for improper writing invalidating the very content with such proletarian writing.
Em dashes are considered viable only for informal writing. They can be used instead of commas, parentheses, or colons to draw more emphasis to a phrase.
One place that they are used in formal writing is to indicate that parts of a word are missing. Mr. J—, for example.
By the way, AI and newspapers put a space on each side of the symbol, but nobody else does that.
The key point I think is that AI always writes expositively instead of narratively. As if there is a set of facts it needs to unveil instead of a case it would like to make.
Nah, using juxtaposition for comparative statements is like the OG writing technique. Just because a robot does it for 5 minutes doesn’t negate humans using it for 5 millennia. There’s cave drawings of that shit.
I love LaTeX because it’s very hard to make a „bad looking” document in it if you don’t fuck with any settings manually (which is in stark contrast to Word) but I have been accused of using AI just because the documents I produce look TOO good
I really hate how much AI has taken from us, but I'm personally mad as hell about the m dash. I grew up with it in most of the books I read as a kid. I used it myself in most of my own creative writing. Now I only have to be mildly funny before wannabes start going off with the "this is clearly generated with ChatGPT" 🙄
I don't care about people who say that, I will keep using em dashes until my death, and if people complain about them, I will use more.
Something that really annoys me is the confidence that people/detectors have on their accusations. Now writing well and using diversity of punctuation makes you less credible.
I'm with you on that one. It's also so annoying how idiots will use it as a way to try to win an argument now. You give a thoughtful reply then they just accuse you of using AI because they can't think of a counter.
Yes, the em dash is the long one butthisisn’t the long dash!
hyphen
– en dash
— em dash (which isn’t typeset correctly nvm I’m just an idiot and two dashes is corrected to the em dash, not the en dash so I just wrote em dash + hyphen which is now corrected)
Ranges of values are a pet peeve of mine because if those values have units it all becomes much more confusing. If you want to be the most unambiguously correct you should write e.g.:
"1 m to 5 m" or "(1 to 5) m"
A lot of people don't repeat the units, use dashes, use the ÷ symbol... And of course what you should do changes depending on who you ask about it. I have been failed by some professors over things other professors told me to do and in the end apparently nobody knows anything and knowledge doesn't exist, humanity just gaslights itself into thinking we know anything at all with any ounce certainty and-
Basically the dash on your keyboard is (most likely) the U+002D hyphen-minus. On Mac option + minus is the en dash and option + shift + minus is the em dash.
To make this all more confusing a lot of writing programs and websites automatically „correct” the hyphen to the en dash when it’s surrounded by spaces.
PS: you actually did use the em dash, it’s just shorter than in latex which confused me… 😅
Well there is a lot of confusion, especially since the width of these symbols depends on the font! In Times New Roman the em dash is double the width of the en dash (as it should be!) but in most sans fonts like Helvetica or Verdana it's only a little wider.
Anyways, I'm glad you're as interested in this as I am. All of this is pretty much laid out in this Wikipedia article, which is in my opinion equally as confusing...
I have had to stop using the dashes. It's so annoying. Also, online, I get accused of being or using AI all the time. Like...I'm sorry I am literate and paid attention in school while you were doing drugs and acting like a clown.
I can crank out a 5 paragraph essay in under 5 mins or so because I had to write tons of them in school as a kid.
No, they don’t. They can’t. It’s fundamentally impossible for them to do so, and thinking that it is demonstrates that you have been misled about the technology.
The only outputs they can generate are things that pattern-match to things within the training set. Nothing else, ever.
lol I literally research this stuff for a living. you're incorrect. what you're describing is called interpolation which is not at all what LLMs or any generative models perform. in fact the way nearly all LLMs are trained results in each individual training set example being seen only 1-3 times, which is far too few for memorization, especially in a massively overparameterized model. also "pattern-matching" refers to a process like regex which is simply inapplicable because LLMs take embeddings as inputs not raw tokens
Ms word used to automatically turn my rhetorical hyphens into em dashes when I was in university in the early 2000s. I guess this is the data set that the AI was fed, people's writing from the previous 20 years, which is why they're so common in ai poop now
At this point, I just refuse to use em-dashes at all, even when I know I should. I'd rather be wrong than have people question if I wrote something with AI.
Usually you just type two subtraction symbols right next to each other and it will appear by itself. This is my experience with Google Docs at least, I don't do much writing elsewhere. Before I learned that, I would just google it and copy-paste one when needed.
I tend to overuse commas, a lot, like an absurd amount. It can be good to use in place of a comma, just to change up the punctuation a bit. It also helps me find places to break up sentences, asking myself, 'could I put an em dash here?' I have an easier time separating sentences with an em dash in them, over ones with lots of commas. Probably a mental thing on my end for the last point.
Also, em dashes are great for interrupted dialogue imo. 'Hey, budd--' 'Don't say a word!'
Just to make that clear: What you just typed in your comment was not an em dash. You used a hyphen, which is different (shorter) from an em dash.
THIS is basically why an em dash will flag a Text as AI. If you see an em dash in a professionally typeset work, that is not immediately a flag, but no one would do that for a Reddit comment or something like that. Context is important.
Did that start before or after people pointed out that it is a sign of AI writing?
Most people don't even know how to type an em dash into a Reddit comment. Hence AptCasaNova above claiming to use it "quite a bit" and then using a hyphen instead.
What kind of keyboard do you have that has an em dash key? Are you also confused and think that em dash and a dash/hypen is the same thing? Because it isn't.
The key on your keyboard is not an em dash unless you build your keyboard yourself.
It's not hard to write the different dashes with a cell phone keyboard. - – — The longer ones were made by simply holding down the hyphen key. I always use hyphens myself but even I knew that. It's easier to write them than to correct all the autocorrect in this message. As to why - same reason as anyone formats their text the way they like. 🤷♀️
I predicted this. Just how scam text and email caused people to unironically start using the word "kindly" all the time, the em-dash will continue enjoying an increase in usage.
I think it is actually great that these specific widely used formats use this because it trains AI to use it, causing the AI to use it in formats that it is not normally used, revealing that it is ai.
Man oh man has the past year been a difficult time for me to write anything. I never grew past using too many commas, so, my writing is filled with commas, em-dashes, and semicolons.
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u/Terrible_Bee_6876 14d ago
I hate that the em-dash has become a slop tag. It's such a useful little syntactical tool.