They are one of several signs of LLM writing. That said if you’ve always used them then you do you
Edit: To the idiots who downvoted me: The article’s author literally mentions that he used AI to write it, so it isn’t speculation on my part. That said, my point still stands: em dashes are just one of several tell-tale signs of LLM writing. See here, here, and here.
Obviously, AI picked this up from writers who used the em dash. However, ChatGPT uses it excessively and so now it is a sign of its writing. Practically speaking you should avoid it in your future writing, since no one really cares if it is a false positive or not.
Final Edit: I see replies stating that from people who’ve been using it for years who don’t want to stop because LLM’s appropriated it. I already left a Lemmy comment here that more-or-less goes over why you should care about optics (especially when writing in an activist adjacent space), but what do I know 🤷
It’s sad, because for most people the use-case for an m-dash is relatively narrow—a parenthetic interjection relevant to the topic but not sufficiently off-topic for brackets, and needing a subtle call to authority—it mostly popped up in academic or pseudo intellectual non-fiction, or in faulknerian ponderous fiction, but also as a hapless crutch for endlesss neurodivergent layers of qualification.
So I am going to claim disability discrimination about this brutal and unjust sudden boycott, on behalf of crew #adhd.
I just realized that I could have double-layered the m-dashes there, eh? Missed opportunity. Oh what the hell, I need to prolong lunch break juuust a little bit more, so
Are we at war with em dashes now? —? I’m starting to feel like the only person who actually knows how to type them on a keyboard.
They are one of several signs of LLM writing. That said if you’ve always used them then you do you
Edit: To the idiots who downvoted me: The article’s author literally mentions that he used AI to write it, so it isn’t speculation on my part. That said, my point still stands: em dashes are just one of several tell-tale signs of LLM writing. See here, here, and here.
Obviously, AI picked this up from writers who used the em dash. However, ChatGPT uses it excessively and so now it is a sign of its writing. Practically speaking you should avoid it in your future writing, since no one really cares if it is a false positive or not.
Final Edit: I see replies stating that from people who’ve been using it for years who don’t want to stop because LLM’s appropriated it. I already left a Lemmy comment here that more-or-less goes over why you should care about optics (especially when writing in an activist adjacent space), but what do I know 🤷
It’s sad, because for most people the use-case for an m-dash is relatively narrow—a parenthetic interjection relevant to the topic but not sufficiently off-topic for brackets, and needing a subtle call to authority—it mostly popped up in academic or pseudo intellectual non-fiction, or in faulknerian ponderous fiction, but also as a hapless crutch for endlesss neurodivergent layers of qualification.
So I am going to claim disability discrimination about this brutal and unjust sudden boycott, on behalf of crew #adhd.
I both resent and resemble that remark.
I just realized that I could have double-layered the m-dashes there, eh? Missed opportunity. Oh what the hell, I need to prolong lunch break juuust a little bit more, so
I’m not going to let LLMs enstupidify my writing.
I’ll continue using en dashes and em dashes — they’re very easy to type on macos, iOS, and Android.
Alright then. If you were always using them correctly then you do you