Not Only Am I Losing My Livelihood to AI – Now It's Stealing My Em Dashes Too

In Dutch I have the luxury of being able to use the semi-colon in a similar capacity — useful to avoid the em-dash stigma I suppose — but I refuse to relinquish it in English.

Fortunately, I can always just point to evidence of prior use here:

https://www.gally.net/miscellaneous/hn-em-dash-user-leaderbo...

Nah, go the opposite direction — post with em dashes. Let them think you're AI, till they realize people are posting it to spite the "its AI bro" remarks.

Some subreddits now force you to do this. I've been typing three hyphens as a petulant show of passive aggression.

I started purposefully using the more often in hopes that someone would confuse it as being written by an LLM.

Fuck that. I'm using the correct punctuation every time. Anyone using em dashes as anything other than the lowest possible AI signal is just robbing themselves. And if they do it en masse, spammers will just put a dirt simple filter on their AI output and fool them all again.

Yeah, I used to like technology. I don't anymore. LLMs just seem like they were purposefully built to annoy me personally. I dislike pretty much everything about them:

Everything they produce looks high-quality, only a fraction of it actually is. This makes time-tested signals of high-quality texts (e.g. em-dashes) worthless. I know it really doesn't matter but the fact that em-dashes specifically are now signals of AI slop is just so sad.

Vibe-coding is the exact opposite direction I wanted software engineering to go. I liked that computers followed hard rules and that I never needed social engineering to get a computer to do the thing I wanted it to do.

I'm not sure if LLMs will do more harm if they stay with the capabilities they currently have, where they are most useful for scams, spam and slop or if the promises actually hold and most white-collar jobs are automated away.

I hate that AI is going for the stuff I like (creating art, writing software) while I still have to do all the chores I dislike (doing the dishes, washing clothes).

I genuinely think that LLMs will have a strong negative effect on my life and society as a whole.

It looks to me like software engineering could be dead in the near future. Note that AI doesn't need to be as good as human programmers to replace them. It just needs to be good enough.

I'm thinking of switching careers as long as I still can. The second it becomes clear that software engineering is dead the job market will burst into flames and finding something else will become almost impossible. Even if this doesn't happen I absolutely despise the idea that my job will now include drudge work like reviewing AI slop merge requests.

You can check out the HN em dash leaderboard to see that people definitely do use them in comments. (I was pleased to come in at #16.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45071722

And option-hyphen has typed one directly for even longer… wait, is AI coming for my option-semicolon too?

Even using "big words" gets you mistaken for AI these days, which is especially frustrating when you have a richer vocabulary than average due to growing up reading a lot of books.

Long-press on the dash on mobile (in Google keyboard at list) gives you two em-dash options.

...yeah, I guess people who don't know how to write are now assuming I use AI to generate my thoughts.

It's still so damn easy these days to spot AI writing — it's hamstrung by the milquetoast limitations imposed by its corporate masters, particularly even it comes to the default prompt.

And don't get me started on the use of language. Most writing is bad, so the AI has integrated the worst if it too.

But people thinking that something was written by an AI because of punctuation (and not, say, because you're seeing a list masquerading as an argument) is the kind of thing that makes me lose faith in humanity.

It would do it but you had to explicitly type a double dash -- iirc without spaces between the preceding and following word for Word to create an em-dash instead of an en-dash; ie this--is an em dash and this -- is and en dash. (at least in my work's version of Word, which should be pretty default, I haven't touched it at least).

Also LLMs use them a lot more than most people so randomly seeing them pop up in tweets and forum posts was taken as a pretty clear sign the text wasn't legitimate. It's also weirdly deeply embedded in the models and you cannot simply prompt it out of existence. [0] A lot of it is about context too. If I see it on a blog post it feels less out of place than on Reddit or bluesky.

[0] https://medium.com/@brentcsutoras/the-em-dash-dilemma-how-a-...

I don't think so. I think MS Word turns space+hyphen+space into space+en-dash+space. (Note "en" not "em".) It might turn two consecutive hyphens into an em-dash (not sure about it, because I prefer space+en-dash+space, not the em-dash without spaces).

People who are too stupid to understand the proper use of an em dash are assuming that seeing them is a sign that something was written by an LLM.

You are not the crazy one. Em-dashes in Internet content has been one way to spot a Mac user "in the wild" for a long time. (MacOS automatically converts a double-dash in almost any text field to an em-dash. Even when you actually wanted a double-dash.)

There's enough places where em-dashes are inconvenient to type that I find it to be a reasonable indicator, particularly on the web. I don't think most people know how to generate an em-dash with a hotkey, so if I see one in a Reddit comment for example there's a high likelihood that the comment was either LLM generated or at least copy-pasted from somewhere else. Generally speaking in the past I observed a low prevalence of em-dashes on the internet except in more formal writing, so if I see an em-dash in a context where I ordinarily wouldn't expect one I do get suspicious. It's the same thing with the green check emoji, it's possible that a regular user typed it, but pre-LLM I can't recall ever seeing them, so these days I automatically assume it's AI generated content

And where are they?

Why are em dashes great?

—Fixed width font preferer

Prepare to be delighted: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash#En_dash

There is, of course, quite a bit of tongue-in-cheekiness in that article.

I like ellipses, they are best to convey my train of thought.

i guess you are saying that writers cant take creative freedom in their writing bending the rules to prove a point i dont agree but i do hate it when people do it on forums eschewing punctuation and capital letters which can often cause confusion and worst of all are the people who write one sentence per paragraph though your parentheses save you from that one

AI makes typoes all the same.

i like youre thinking

Oh please, yes. And AI voices must sound like Twiki. Let's keep the world sensible.