[gabev]

Quite a lot of em dashes for the New Yorker...

[EDIT] Several commenters rightly noted that heavy em-dash usage is normal for the New Yorker (and common thanks to OS auto-replacement), so my “LLM giveaway” quip was off-base. Leaving this up for context—thanks for the corrections.

[Aurornis]

LLMs use em dashes because they’re in a lot of writing. They didn’t invent the concept.

I had to stop using em dashes in my own writing because it triggers people who never really thought about them prior to reading about their association with LLMs.

[psunavy03]

The only people who think em dashes are a dead giveaway for AI are people who don't know how to write and whose grammar is too poor to use them properly.

[gruez]

You realize that the reason why em dashes are so prevalent in chatgpt output is that they're present in the training data, ie. newspaper/magazine articles? I get being suspicious of em dashes in a reddit comment or whatever, but I'd expect em dashes from a professionally typeset publication.

[bee_rider]

Professionally typeset publications, or word documents, or regular Internet comments written by iOS users—it converts double-dashes to em-dashes automatically.

I’m convinced most folks noticing this now just weren’t aware of the punctuation before they heard about it in the AI paranoia context.

I’m also convinced a good chunk of Reddit comments are AI spam. But, I mean, we have to imagine anyone running an AI campaign knows to avoid the em-dashes by now.

[cosmic_cheese]

Even in a Reddit comment they’re not that strange. macOS and iOS automatically turn two dashes in to an em dash when typing, so a lot of posters are probably using them without even realizing it and another portion stumbled across that and thought “oh neat” and kept doing it. Same goes for smart quotes.

So it’s just as likely that by spotting those features in a post you’ve found an Apple user as it is that the poster is an LLM.