Statements like this always feel a bit rude to me—as a Chinese, I use em dashes (in Chinese texts) on a daily basis and insert them in English texts when I see fit.
A bit of background: Em dashes “—” (or, very often, double em-dashes “——”) are to Chinese texts what hyphens “-” are to English texts. We use them in ranges “魯迅（1881－1936）”, in name concatenations “任－洛二氏溶液（Ringer-Locke solution）”, to express sounds “呜——”火车开动了, or `“Chouuuuuuuuu”, starts the train' in English, and in place of sentence breaks like this——just like em dashes in English texts. They are so commonly used that most Chinese input methods map Shift+- (i.e., underscores “_”) to double em-dashes. So, as a result, while I see many English people have to resort to weird sequences like “Alt + 0151” for an em-dash, a huge population in the world actually has no difficulty in using em-dashes. What a surprise!
As for this article, obviously it was translated from its Chinese version, so, yeah I don't see em-dashes as an AI indicator. And for the weird emoji “” (U+1F54A), I'm fairly certain that it comes from the Chinese idiom “放鸽子” (stand someone up, or, literally, release doves/pigeons), which has evolved into “鸽了” (pigeon'ed), a humorous way to say “delayed, sorry!”.
Totally agree, I don't think em dashes are a particularly useful AI tell unless they're used in a weird way. Left to my own devices (as a native English speaker who likes em dashes and parentheticals), I often end up with at least one em dash every other paragraph, if not more frequently.
On another note, it may be useful to you to know that in most English dialects, referring to a person solely by their nationality (e.g., when you wrote "as a Chinese") is considered rude or uncouth, and it may mark your speech/writing as non-native. It is generally preferable to use nationalities as adjective rather than nouns (e.g., "as a Chinese person"). The two main exceptions are when employing metonymy, such as when referring to a nation's government colloquially (e.g., "the Chinese will attend the upcoming UN summit") or when using the nationality to indicate broad trends among the population of the nation (e.g., "the Chinese sure know how to cook!"). I hope this is considered a helpful interjection rather than an unwelcome one, but if not, I apologize!
This comment has become more robotic than the thing it criticises. People use em-dashes and emoji all the time! They are easy to type. On Apple operating systems you can even make em-dashes accidentally by default by simply using two hyphens. Those by themselves aren’t sufficient to detect LLM writing, please stop propagating that wrong idea. And emoji?! Human communication over the internet is littered with them, they’re insanely popular and have their own jargon and innuendos.
Most AI tells are like this. I have been taught in marketing training to list things in pairs of three, because that's punchy, sufficiently succinct and very memorable. Now this is strongly associated with AI
After all AI didn't pick up these habits out of nowhere - all the tells are good writing advice and professional typography, but used with a frequency you would only see in highly polished texts like marketing copy
gudzpoz|3 months ago
A bit of background: Em dashes “—” (or, very often, double em-dashes “——”) are to Chinese texts what hyphens “-” are to English texts. We use them in ranges “魯迅（1881－1936）”, in name concatenations “任－洛二氏溶液（Ringer-Locke solution）”, to express sounds “呜——”火车开动了, or `“Chouuuuuuuuu”, starts the train' in English, and in place of sentence breaks like this——just like em dashes in English texts. They are so commonly used that most Chinese input methods map Shift+- (i.e., underscores “_”) to double em-dashes. So, as a result, while I see many English people have to resort to weird sequences like “Alt + 0151” for an em-dash, a huge population in the world actually has no difficulty in using em-dashes. What a surprise!
As for this article, obviously it was translated from its Chinese version, so, yeah I don't see em-dashes as an AI indicator. And for the weird emoji “” (U+1F54A), I'm fairly certain that it comes from the Chinese idiom “放鸽子” (stand someone up, or, literally, release doves/pigeons), which has evolved into “鸽了” (pigeon'ed), a humorous way to say “delayed, sorry!”.
[0] https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/标点符号用法
DonaldPShimoda|3 months ago
On another note, it may be useful to you to know that in most English dialects, referring to a person solely by their nationality (e.g., when you wrote "as a Chinese") is considered rude or uncouth, and it may mark your speech/writing as non-native. It is generally preferable to use nationalities as adjective rather than nouns (e.g., "as a Chinese person"). The two main exceptions are when employing metonymy, such as when referring to a nation's government colloquially (e.g., "the Chinese will attend the upcoming UN summit") or when using the nationality to indicate broad trends among the population of the nation (e.g., "the Chinese sure know how to cook!"). I hope this is considered a helpful interjection rather than an unwelcome one, but if not, I apologize!
apricot|3 months ago
In fact, complement is a concept in counting systems, and the Chinese term for it is "complement".
latexr|3 months ago
tjohns|3 months ago
I dislike that people think you're an AI if you're using proper typography. :(
wrs|3 months ago
martin-t|3 months ago
Many proper uses of the em-dash put two words visually together—despite being parts of two distinct units separated by the em-dash.
I much prefer using a normal dash with a space on each side - like this.
wongarsu|3 months ago
After all AI didn't pick up these habits out of nowhere - all the tells are good writing advice and professional typography, but used with a frequency you would only see in highly polished texts like marketing copy
unknown|3 months ago
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