My biggest sorrow right now is the fact that my beloved emdash is a major signal for AI generated content. I've been using it for decades now but these days, I almost always pause for a second.
> I've been using it for decades now but these days, I almost always pause for a second.
Wrote about this before [0] but my 2c: you shouldn't pause and you should keep using them because fuck these companies and their AI tools. We should not give them the power to dictate how we write.
Gemini tells me that for thousands of years, the swastika was used as "a symbol of positivity, luck and cosmic order". Try drawing it on something now and showing it to people. Is this an effective way to fight Nazism?
I think it's brave to keep using em dashes, but I don't think it's smart, because we human writers who like using them (myself very much included) will never have the mindshare to displace the culturally dominant meaning. At least, not until the dominant forces in AI decide of their own accord that they don't want their LLMs emitting so many of them.
I think it's safe to assume they meant it within their specific cultural context. They the symbol has different connotations in other cultures doesn't really change the point being made.
My point is just: if a test for what a symbol ‘really means’ depends on choosing an audience that conveniently erases everyone who uses it differently, that’s not describing intrinsic meaning, that’s describing the author’s cultural bubble and bias.
And on em dashes—most people outside tech circles see no “AI fingerprint,” and designers like myself have loved them since early Mac DTP, so the suspicion feels hilariously retroactive and very knee-jerk. So what if somebody thinks my text here is written by a bot?
> So what if somebody thinks my text here is written by a bot?
Then they might not read it at all. I often zone out as soon as I expect I'm reading slop and that's the reason try to ensure my own writing isn't slop adjacent.
I'm also not sure there is an "AI bubble." Everyone I know is using it in every industry. Museum education, municipal health services, vehicle engineering, publishing, logistics, I'm seeing it everywhere.
As mentioned elsewhere I've seen non-tech people refer to them as "AI dashes."
> if a test for what a symbol ‘really means’
There was no suggestion of such a test. No symbol has an intrinsic meaning. The point GP was about considering how your output will be received.
That point was very obviously made within a specific cultural context, at the very least limited to the world of the Latin alphabet. I'm sure there are other LLM signifiers outside of that bubble.
> I often zone out as soon as I expect I'm reading slop and that's the reason try to ensure my own writing isn't slop adjacent.
And how is this a problem someone else has to address? Some people zone out when they see a text is too long: are we supposed to only publish short form then? I have 10 years of writing on my site, if someone in 2026 sees my use of em dashes and suddenly starts thinking that my content is AI generated that's their problem, not mine.
Too many people are willingly bending to adapt to what AI companies are doing. I'm personally not gonna do it. Because again, now it's em dashes, tomorrow it could be a set of words, or a way to structure text. I say fuck that.
> And how is this a problem someone else has to address?
Where has anyone made the claim that it is?
> Some people zone out when they see a text is too long: are we supposed to only publish short form then?
No, but a good writer will generally consider if their text is needlessly verbose and try to make it palatable to their audience.
> starts thinking that my content is AI generated that's their problem, not mine.
If you want to reach them with your writing then it might become a problem. Obviously the focus on em dashes alone isn't enough but it's undoubtedly one of the flags.
> Too many people are willingly bending to adapt to what AI companies are doing.
It's bending rather to what readers are feeling. It's not following the top down orders of a corporation, it's being aware of how technology shapes readers' expectations and adapting your writing to that.
I'm not confident that the average person is aware of an em dash nor that it is widely associated with AI; I think the current culturally dominant meaning is just a fat hyphen (which most people just call a dash anyway).
My wife was working from home recently and I overheard a meeting she was having. It's a very non technical field. She and her team were working on a presentation and her boss said "let's use one of those little AI dashes here."
> Gemini tells me that for thousands of years, the swastika was used as "a symbol of positivity, luck and cosmic order". Try drawing it on something now and showing it to people. Is this an effective way to fight Nazism?
I'm happy to change my position when some 13 million people are killed by lunatics that used the em dash as the symbol of their ideology. Until then, I'll keep using it everywhere it's appropriate.
Also, if we don't have the guts to resist even when the stakes are this low and the consequences for our resistance are basically non existent, then society is doomed. We might as well roll on our side and die.
> At least, not until the dominant forces in AI decide of their own accord that they don't want their LLMs emitting so many of them.
It's not a power I'm willing to give them. What if tomorrow they tweak something and those tool start to use a specific word more often? Or a different punctuation sign? What do we do then? Do we constantly adapt, playing whack-a-mole? What if AI starts asking a lot more questions in their writing? Do we stop asking them as a result?
You feel free to adapt and bend. I'm personally not going to do it and if someone starts thinking that I'm using AI to write my thoughts and as a result that's on them.
For what it's worth, whatever LLMs do extensively, they do because it's a convention in well-established writing styles.
LLMs have a bias towards expertise and confidence due to the proportion of books in their training set. They also lean towards an academic writing style for the same reason.
All this to say, if LLMs write like you were already writing, it means you have very good foundations. It's fine to avoid them out of fear, but you have this Internet stranger's permission to use your em dash pause to think "Oh yeah, I'm the reference for writing style."
> For what it's worth, whatever LLMs do extensively, they do because it's a convention in well-established writing styles.
I think that's only part of the story. I think that while it's true what LLMs do is somehow represented in their corpus of training data, they also lack any understanding of how to adapt to the context, how to find a suitable "voice", and how not to overdo it, unless you explicitly prompt them otherwise, which is too much of a burden. Their default voice sucks, basically.
So let's say they learned to speak in Redditese. They don't know when not to speak in that voice. They always seem to be trying to make persuasive arguments, follow patterns of "It's not X. It's Y. And you know it (mic drop)." But real humans don't speak like this all the damn time. If you speak like this to your mom or to your closest friends, you're basically an idiot.
It's not that you cannot speak like this. It's that you cannot do it all the time. And that's the real problem with LLMs.
Mostly because when I see an em dash now, I assume that it was written by AI, not that the author is one of the people who puts enough effort into their product that they intentionally use specific sized dashes.
AI might suck, but if the author doesn't change, they get categorized as a lazy AI user, unless the rest of their writing is so spectacular that it's obvious an AI didn't write it.
My personal situation is fine though. AI writing usually has better sentence structure, so it's pretty easy (to me at least) to distinguish my own writing from AI because I have run-on sentences and too many commas. Nobody will ever confuse me with a lazy AI user, I'm just plain bad at writing.
There's your trouble. The real problem is that most internet users are setting their baseline for "standard issue human writing" at exactly the level they themselves write. The problem is that more and more people do not draw a line between casual/professional writing, and as such balk at very normal professional writing as potentially AI-driven.
Blame OS developers for making it easy—SO easy!—to add all manner of special characters while typing if you wish, but the use of those characters, once they were within easy reach, grew well before AI writing became a widespread thing. If it hadn't, would AI be using it so much now?
As someone who frequently posts online- with em dashes- I wonder if I am part of the problem with training llms to use them so much- and am going to get punished in the future for doing so.
I also tend to way overuse parenthesis (because I tend to wander in the middle of sentences) but they haven't shown up much in llms so /shrug.
Or you're writing for the people who haven't deluded themselves into thinking that they're magical LLM detectors, which definitely does seem like a win.
> Or you're writing for the people who haven't deluded themselves into thinking that they're magical LLM detectors, which definitely does seem like a win.
What delusion? The false positive rate just on HN alone is so low it's not even a rounding error.
I don’t think I’m judging shallowly- there is no em-dash on a standard keyboard. The one way it ends up in real writing is if you use a typesetting program like LaTeX, or Word changes an en-dash with auto formatting, or the user consciously interrupts their writing flow to insert the character with a special keystroke combination or by pasting it in. The proportion of people who do any of those things in writing for the web is quite small. The number of clearly AI written posts with em-dashes is quite large. So large, that I immediately suspect AI writing when I see an em-dash and I rarely see countering evidence that suggests the author is human but meticulous about how they write.
> there is no em-dash on a standard keyboard. The one way it ends up in real writing is (…)
Then you proceed to list multiple ways to do it, but neglected to mention that by default on Apple operating systems they are inserted automatically when typing “--“. It’s something you have to explicitly turn off of you don’t want it. On Apple mobile operating systems you can also long press the hyphen to get the option. Em-dashes are trivial to type.
Both of the examples you gave both fall under "a special keystroke combination," which I did list. Typing "--" is two keystrokes compared to one for an en-dash.
The iOS example isn't just "long press the hyphen" it's "press the [123] button, long press the hyphen, and slide your finger over the em-dash" compared to "press the [123] button, long press the hyphen" for the en-dash.
If you're going to argue at least be genuine. I didn't say it was hard to type an em-dash, I showed that every way to get an em-dash into your writing takes an extra step. Taking an extra step compared to other characters means it isn't trivial.
For someone writing publication quality work, em-dashes appear and if I see an em-dash in a book I don't assume AI writing. But for comments on the internet or a blog posts that aren't meticulous everywhere else, an en-dash is a pretty good signal that the work is AI generated. When people are writing, needing an extra step to insert an em-dash is disruptive to most people's train of thought.
Neither did I say you said that. I only said they are trivial to type. Which they are. I do it all the time, and it doesn’t interrupt my train of thought any more than a comma. I also do the keyboard shortcuts for things like “smart quotes” and apostrophes (’). For some of those I even have my own special snippets in Alfred, like typing "" produces “” with the caret in between. I can’t even tell you what the exact shortcuts for those are without looking at my fingers, because they are so ingrained in my muscle memory. I know I’m far from alone in that.
> But for comments on the internet or a blog posts that aren't meticulous everywhere else, an en-dash is a pretty good signal that the work is AI generated.
Exactly this! I love(d) using em dashes.
Now they’ve become ehm dashes, experiencing exactly that pause — that moment of hesitation — that you describe
AI never uses em dashes in a pair like this, whereas most people who like em dashes do. Anyone who calls paired em dash writing AI is only revealing themselves to be a duffer.
In my limited text generation experience, LLMs use em-dashes precisely like that, only without spaces on the sides and always in pairs in a single sentence. Here some examples from my Gemini history:
"The colors we see—like blue, green, and hazel—are the result of Tyndall scattering."
"Several interlocking cognitive biases create a "safety net" around the familiar, making the unknown—even if objectively better—feel like a threat."
"A retrograde satellite will pass over its launch region twice every 24 hours—once on a "northbound" track and once on a "southbound" track—but because of the way Earth rotates, it won't pass over the exact same spot on every orbit."
"Central, leverages streaming telemetry to provide granular, real-time performance data—including metrics (e.g., CPU utilization, throughput, latency), logs, and traces—from its virtualized core and network edge devices."
"When these conditions are met—indicating a potential degradation in service quality (e.g., increased modem registration failures, high latency on a specific Remote PHY)—Grafana automatically triggers notifications through configured contact points (e.g., Slack, PagerDuty)."
After collecting these samples I've noticed that they are especially probably in questions like explain something or write descriptive text. In the short queries there is not much text in total to trigger this effect.
Yes, the LLMs have made great progress in that regard. It wasn't too long ago that the majority of dashes seen in LLM material could have been commas, periods, or nothing at all with no loss of tone or meaning, and almost none were used to offset parenthetical phrases. It was nearly exclusively an overdramatic flourish. And now look at them. They're growing up. Just makes you want to squeeze them until they pop.
We're in the brief window of time when AI's writing style is the weirdness. It's an artifact of the production process, like JPG blur, MP3 distortion, autotune's rigidity. And it didn't take long for those things to become normalized, in fact for them to become artifacts that people proudly adopted and embraced. DJs release tracks built from MP3s samples instead of waves. Autotune is famously a 'sound' that was once something to be subtly added and never confessed to, but which now genres and artists lean into rather than away from.
Long story short: I think emoji in headings and lists, em dashes, and the vile TED Talk paragraph structure of "long sentence with lots of words asking a question or introducing a possibility. followed by. short sentences. rebutting. or affirming." are here to stay. My money is that it gets normalized and embraced as "well of course that's how you best communicate because I see it everywhere."
> "well of course that's how you best communicate because I see it everywhere."
These assumptions might also change though. Up until now any writing you saw "everywhere" was probably written by someone who studied and loved written communication and was brining their artisanal care to the table. That's no longer the case.
It's called slop for a reason. When I come across a GitHub README written by AI I don't feel put off just because the author used AI to write it, I feel frustrated because it's genuinely poorly communicating with me. Fill of extraneous details, artifacts from the conversation, and stuff I already know ("uses GitHub to share the source democratically!").
Not to mention "seriously", "really", "truly", "very", "verily", etc. There's a long history of using words related to truth as intensifiers in English.
I've noticed that LLMs generated text often has spaces around em dashes, which I found odd. They don't always do that, but they do it often enough that it stood out to me since that isn't what you'd normally see.
> Or, you could use spaces between em dashes, as incorrect as it is.
That's the normal way of using them in British English. Though they also tend to be the (slightly shorter) en-dashes too.
I feel that style is often pretty common on the "old" internet - possibly related to how they can be so easily be replaced by a hyphen back when ascii was a likely limitation.
> Or, you could use spaces between em dashes, as incorrect as it is.
It's a matter of style preference. I support spaces around em-dashes — particularly for online writing, since em-dashes without spaces make selecting and copying text with precision an unnecessary frustration.
By the way,what other punctuation mark receives no space on at least one side?Wouldn't it look odd,make sentences harder to read,and make ideas more difficult to grok?I certainly think so.Don't you? /s
I don't think someone who doesn't want AI slop filtering out someone who gets mad at that to the point of calling them haters is really a false positive.
This is the modern day "I can tell that's photoshopped because I've seen some 'shops in my day." The sooner we stop glorifying the people who think they're magical LLM detectors, the better, frankly.
It doesn't have to be a perfect filter to be a good heuristic. And unless you have a better suggestion how people can avoid slop then it'll keep being used.
You’re absolutely right. I hate AI writing — it’s not that I hate AI, it’s that it makes everything it says sound a specific combination of smug and authoritative — No matter the content. Once you realize it’s not saying anything, that’s the real aha moment.
