[iansteyn]

It’s a real pity to me that em-dashes are becoming so disliked for their association with AI. I have long had a personal soft spot for them because I just like them aesthetically and functionally. I prided myself on searching for and correctly using em, en, and regular dashes, had a Google docs shortcut for turning `- - -` into `—` and more recently created an Obsidian auto-replacement shortcut that turns `-em` into `—`. Guess I’ll just have to use it sparingly and keep my prose otherwise human.

[jasonvorhe]

Don't change your behaviour because some corporations made questionable decisions.

Your readers won't care about the dashes as long as the texts read like they had human origins and you have something to tell.

[keiferski]

Unfortunately a lot of contests etc. are anti-AI usage without having a formal system for detecting it. In practice that means anyone using a lot of em-dashes will be flagged by a reviewer as AI-likely.

[whynotmakealt]

If I found em-dashes and other patterns like its just not X but Y and all the other things we correlate with AI, I might call a person using it.

I don't understand the purpose of using LLM's to write articles unless someone wants to be the middleman of slop and if that's the case, I'd rather cut middlemans and get slop directly from the AI models, instead of pasting the output of what chatgpt generated, give me the prompt and maybe temperature/other settings if need be to make it more reproducible but the prompt itself could be enough smh

I am not saying you should change your writing style, but at the same time, you have to understand, if someone writes like AI, Chances are that we are too tired of looking too deep into it to find if its written by AI or not, we are tired of it & so you must understand our or anybody's frustration if they call out someone's writing as AI.

For those using AI to write articles/etc. : If you are passionate about something, write about it, write what you want, how you want and you will be proud. But if you use LLM, you will constantly be called upon and frankly, it reduces the purpose of writing.

For code, there is a debate that code is just an means to an end (which is to do stuff like scripts etc.) but there is no end to writing, for what? for more views/etc., there is no point in getting such attention or anything considering it would just be negative attention if I or anyone found AI writing.

Not sure why people use AI text generation for articles etc. Idk.

This is my alt but when I had first started out on HN, I thought my english was fine but then somebody pointed it out and I try to fix my grammar and now its second nature to me writing.

I would be curious to know the reasons as to why people write text stuff with AI in the first place. It doesn't make sense to me since the other side would use their slop to counter your slop, at that point just create a tldr post, why strech an article in more words than unnecessary (I feel like I also write a lot of filler words / yap personally but alright, atleast you know a human is writing this), I don't get the point of writing longer if you aren't even writing it, is it to get SEO or, is the end goal money like all things?

[krzrak]

I feel you... For 30+ years of my life I prided myself for writing without typos and other mistakes (without autocorrect), using lots of bullet points, dashes, and words such as "delve into" or "underscore".

Now I find myself intentionally adding typos and other msitakes, and using less sophisticated language, just to not be accused of using AI.

[hdgvhicv]

It’s been about 30 years since prose editors like word started underlining spelling mistakes in red. I don’t get typos when writing formal text in a keyboard. One handed on a touch screen phone with “auto correct” causing issues is another thing, but not for published articles.

[matsemann]

I don't mind that in a "proper" text where it's actually useful and fun to read something with a flair. But maybe it has always irked people in short form (forum comments etc), but they've never just called it out until now? I do sometimes read something that gives me an "iamverysmart" feeling, as if the author used a thesaurus to find a synonym for half the words to sound clever but it just makes the whole thing incomprehensible.

[topaz0]

The distinctiveness of LLM language comes from overuse of specific words, not because it has a particularly sophisticated vocabulary. Some of the words it overuses may be considered sophisticated by some people, but that's not what makes it identifiable (or what makes it grating). It's still not hard to distinguish your voice from LLMs by being thoughtful about style at all.

(Edit: corrected (unintentional) typo)

[topaz0]

Part of it is the guilt-by-association with the other bad writing habits of LLMs, but I think a lot of it is just that LLMs genuinely overuse them, and that homogeneity is grating just like it's grating when you notice a text reuses a particular noticeable word or whatever. As a fellow em-dash user, I have sometimes noticed myself overusing them too, and revised accordingly, starting well before the proliferation of this particular cancer.

So I think you can keep using em-dashes without being associated with LLMs as long as you reserve them for particularly effective/tasteful occasions.

[damnesian]

In my mind, their rightful place is transcription of written speech where the speaker pauses, and either inserts an island idea, or changes course. The comma doesn't suffice, because it's bridging an initial idea with expounding on the same idea. But so many times in written text I see it abused, lazily employed, because the author used a sentence fragment for effect, or wanted to amp up the pause and drama when a comma or, hell, even a semi-colon would have served the purpose better.

The advent of the generic AI writing style has had one good effect on my own work: making me take an unflinching look at my own laziness in writing. Now I tend to clean things up while at the same time try to inject some personality in order to NOT be dismissed as AI.

[nandomrumber]

I agree, parentheses are not only used incorrectly in a lot of online writing, they’re also ugly.

[avazhi]

The em dash is just one of a group of traits that make something obviously written by a bot. If you use em dashes in conjunction with good writing then nobody will give a shit.

[eastbound]

Cmd + “-“ = –

Cmd + Shift + “-“ = —

Let’s spread the word until everyone fancy uses them, and then those who criticize text for coming from LLMs will be ridiculed by our ridiculous skills.

[Etheryte]

That's interesting, for me those shortcuts are with option, not command. On my laptop, the first shortcut you wrote down is used to zoom out.

[latexr]

It’s ⌥ instead of ⌘, and those exact shortcuts depend on keyboard layout. You posted the US version, but others reverse the em and en dashes.

[iansteyn]

I tried some of these today, unfortunately it seems they’re not universal across programs.

[lm28469]

While you're automated out of your dashes people are automated out of their jobs, relax you'll be ok

[Mawr]

Try out semicolons instead; they're never used but fun to play with too!

[Xorakios]

semicolons seem to more accurately separate follow-up thoughts than em-dashes to my meathead, and I asked Perplexity/Comet this morning: what is easiest to process a whole list of options to save processing power and give most accurate results.

line breaks was first; semi-colons was second.

(and yep, I goofed around with both those ;)