It’s become a mark of LLM-generated text because of its common use in more professional typesetting situations - such as the large amounts of texts used to train LLMs - while being uncommon in everyday use due to less accessible on keyboards.
People (on Linux & MacOS) are fucking lazy. I’ve been using topographically correct quotes, apostrophes and dashes since forever. It takes a minute to learn which key + Opt/AltGr does em/en dashes.
Of course you’re right about Windows, which for some inexplicable reason ships with braindead useless keyboard layouts. I don’t blame its users for not seeking out better keyboard layouts, that’s much more involved than finding the right key combination.
I agree with you, but also, in casual text (at least in my experience), hyphens are used much more commonly in its place. I don’t even know how to type an em dash on a physical keyboard, and I’ve gotten too used to it to even bother on a touch-keyboard. While it’s not absolute proof of generated text, it is a red flag, imo.
I’ve been a fan of em-dashes for a long time, mainly to try and make sentences more coherent without overusing commas, semicolons, and whatever the “…” is called. It’s just another piece of the grammatical jigsaw that allows written language to kinda have a voice. But I also don’t use an em-dash like 5 times in a paragraph
I just gotta long-press the dash symbol on my phone to use it — like so. Now on a physical keyboard, I gotta really want to use it cause I can never remember the key combination. But I refuse to let AI ruin a perfectly good piece of punctuation for me
You do you. I do think it’s relatively rare (or at least not very widely noticed) to most people, so it’s going to be something of a struggle for the foreseeable future. Best of luck.
Dang, I was thinking “ellipsis” but then was unsure of myself and too lazy to search, so thank you! Honestly, idk anyone IRL who uses em-dahes casually, I just like using 'em (eyyy, a little em joke)
The fact you haven’t seen it and that it’s so common in LLM output just means there’s a huge amount of the internet you don’t look at. That could be a good or bad thing—depending on your perspective.
And in fairness, common things can still be a tell of some kind. The first time I saw a normal webpage rendered in Computer Modern was friggin’ surreal.
Y’all need to relax about a punctuation mark that Markdown does when you hit dash twice.
LLMs didn’t invent the em dash. It appears in the chatbot because it appeared in normal text.
It’s become a mark of LLM-generated text because of its common use in more professional typesetting situations - such as the large amounts of texts used to train LLMs - while being uncommon in everyday use due to less accessible on keyboards.
People (on Linux & MacOS) are fucking lazy. I’ve been using topographically correct quotes, apostrophes and dashes since forever. It takes a minute to learn which key + Opt/AltGr does em/en dashes.
Of course you’re right about Windows, which for some inexplicable reason ships with braindead useless keyboard layouts. I don’t blame its users for not seeking out better keyboard layouts, that’s much more involved than finding the right key combination.
I agree with you, but also, in casual text (at least in my experience), hyphens are used much more commonly in its place. I don’t even know how to type an em dash on a physical keyboard, and I’ve gotten too used to it to even bother on a touch-keyboard. While it’s not absolute proof of generated text, it is a red flag, imo.
I’ve been a fan of em-dashes for a long time, mainly to try and make sentences more coherent without overusing commas, semicolons, and whatever the “…” is called. It’s just another piece of the grammatical jigsaw that allows written language to kinda have a voice. But I also don’t use an em-dash like 5 times in a paragraph
I just gotta long-press the dash symbol on my phone to use it — like so. Now on a physical keyboard, I gotta really want to use it cause I can never remember the key combination. But I refuse to let AI ruin a perfectly good piece of punctuation for me
It’s obviously option-dash for en dashes and option-shift-dash for em dashes on MacOS keyboards.
You don’t even need to learn that, you just think what the most logical way to type them would be, try it once, are correct, and know how to do it.
I don’t have MacOS, but it’s nice they make that intuitive
Overuse commas ? You think they are going to run out. If you are overusing commas try some new sentences.
I’m traumatized by elementary school teachers telling me my sentences were too “choppy”. But verbose quickly becomes run-on… I still have to heal
You do you. I do think it’s relatively rare (or at least not very widely noticed) to most people, so it’s going to be something of a struggle for the foreseeable future. Best of luck.
Also, “…” is an ellipsis, fyi.
Dang, I was thinking “ellipsis” but then was unsure of myself and too lazy to search, so thank you! Honestly, idk anyone IRL who uses em-dahes casually, I just like using 'em (eyyy, a little em joke)
I had never seen it before the LLM surge. Although that might be a case of Baader Meinhof
I’ve been using en (not em) dashes for like 20 years.
They’re used more often in German typography, and I’ve only seen em dashes without spaces around them which is ugly, so I stuck with them.
Again – two dashes will do it. Click the document icon below this comment.
Fwiw, I believe that’s an en dash. Slightly smaller than an em dash (—), but bigger than a hyphen (-).
Again, I had never seen it before, regardless of the fact that it’s easy to type
The fact you haven’t seen it and that it’s so common in LLM output just means there’s a huge amount of the internet you don’t look at. That could be a good or bad thing—depending on your perspective.
And in fairness, common things can still be a tell of some kind. The first time I saw a normal webpage rendered in Computer Modern was friggin’ surreal.
Seriously, I’ve been accused of being AI just because I use em-dashes even though that’s never happened before a year ago. It’s really annoying.