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:
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.
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.
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.
Post with em-dashes, sure—just don’t set them open when setting off parentheticals. If – for that em-dash use – you want to set dashes open, use en-dashes instead.
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.
My kid is an above average and pretty articulate writer for her age, and I'm just waiting in dread for the first time her school accuses her, with no proof of course, of using AI to write an assignment. We'll have to sit down and dumb it down, make some mistakes, and use smaller words so it passes the school's AI filter. It's 100% going to happen, I've never been so certain about anything.
In general forums it's quite often like you've been stuck in an episode of Idiocracy. If we extrapolate the current trajectory it feels like we'll be communicating online with grunts and emojis in a couple of years.
honestly I'm just trying to break the addiction this site and Reddit have intentionally foisted upon me; I'm fairly certain you're all bots, and I hate it here, but I compulsively take out my phone and navigate to this site anyway.
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.
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
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).
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.)
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.
As a non-native English speaker, I will not be mistaken as AI for a while.
Occasionally, I will introduce a small typo just to make sure people don;t think this is AI.
I understand getting triggered by em dashes in a comment section - nobody uses them like that, right? But in an editorial piece? That's where you expect to see them. At least that's what I thought...
Ok... that title should have a comma, not an em dash. If you're going to complain about having them being removed, you have to use them properly at least.
And then
" It seems I have two choices now—keep using em dashes with a sort of stubborn, curmudgeonly pride until all my clients stop exchanging money for words, or start writing incredibly long run-on sentences, like this, with commas all over the place … and maybe ellipses too; ideas connected by semicolons. "
That should be a colon after "two choices". (There's also clearly more than two options, one of which does not involve run-on sentences with his otherwise poor grammar. James seems like a shitty prose crafter if he's unable to avoid run-ons.)
Oh, I get the joke with the second part about the a run-on sentence and intentionally making that grammar mistake; mostly I don't like his hyperbole there and an either-or (the best jokes are the accurate ones). It's mainly the title I loathe for its poor usage of an em dash, which to me doesn't seem to be in on the joke.
Although overuse of ellipses leads to text which generates the impression that the writer is constantly sighing. I find that exasperating and tiring to read.
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
I don't know if it's language or a different era, but I've not really used an em dash. I just use a dash. - versus -- and I did not really start seeing it until LLM's.
Yeah, lately I've found myself editing out my em-dashes, because otherwise people may think it's an LLM writing, not me.
Sigh.
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...
It is time for an emdash manifesto
Some subreddits now force you to do this. I've been typing three hyphens as a petulant show of passive aggression.
Just proves that the majority of Reddit mods are morons.
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.
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.
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.
Post with em-dashes, sure—just don’t set them open when setting off parentheticals. If – for that em-dash use – you want to set dashes open, use en-dashes instead.
I don't get the "em dash = AI" thing. MS Word and iOS have been autocorrecting em dashes for years now.
Right? Am I the crazy one?
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.
My kid is an above average and pretty articulate writer for her age, and I'm just waiting in dread for the first time her school accuses her, with no proof of course, of using AI to write an assignment. We'll have to sit down and dumb it down, make some mistakes, and use smaller words so it passes the school's AI filter. It's 100% going to happen, I've never been so certain about anything.
In general forums it's quite often like you've been stuck in an episode of Idiocracy. If we extrapolate the current trajectory it feels like we'll be communicating online with grunts and emojis in a couple of years.
honestly I'm just trying to break the addiction this site and Reddit have intentionally foisted upon me; I'm fairly certain you're all bots, and I hate it here, but I compulsively take out my phone and navigate to this site anyway.
that's why my username means "idiot"
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-...
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
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).
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.)
And option-hyphen has typed one directly for even longer… wait, is AI coming for my option-semicolon too?
Option-hyphen usually produces an en dash—the em dash is on option-shift-hyphen.
The Unicode horizontal ellipsis is an abomination that doesn't belong in English prose, though.
What's wrong with the ellipsis? Ensures that it doesn't get distributed across two lines. And with a proper proportional font it looks just fine.
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.
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.
>Long-press on the dash on mobile (in Google keyboard at list) gives you two em-dash options.
One is an em-dash (—); the other is an en-dash (–). See, e.g., https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/em-dash-en-dash-how-... for an overview.
No, they are not two em-dash options.
As a non-native English speaker, I will not be mistaken as AI for a while. Occasionally, I will introduce a small typo just to make sure people don;t think this is AI.
i like youre thinking
AI makes typoes all the same.
I've never seen one?
Where did people in this thread learn to use em dashes? I feel like my English teachers failed me.
I suppose my writing is safe for a bit longer; I like my semicolons.
This is exactly the kind of filler article that AI can replace.
Your em dashes never added any extra information to 99.999% of readers. No one cares and neither should you.
I’m an academic—LLM-detectors can pry the em dashes from my cold dead hands.
I understand getting triggered by em dashes in a comment section - nobody uses them like that, right? But in an editorial piece? That's where you expect to see them. At least that's what I thought...
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
This is silly. AI generated pieces will have em dashes edited out too.
My protest is to use em dashes more. Why not? They’re great. Who cares if AI also uses them.
Why are em dashes great?
—Fixed width font preferer
And where are they?
There's one in this reddit comment, explaining about my pxe server project! https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1nqer0c/i_made_...
There's more, but, sadly, they were written as just -.
I didn't even know the em dash or how to produce them until now! FYI: in a Mac, you use Shit + Option + - (the minus) to create the em dash.
I've started using em dashes in—among other places—my HN posts, just to spite the clankers.
Or is this just Wintermute manipulating my behaviors for its own ends?
> Em dashes—often used to connect explanatory phrases, and so named because they’re the width of your average lowercase ‘m’
I did not know that. I just memorized en dash was shorter in length than em dash. If it also corresponds to an "n" length, I'll be delighted.
Prepare to be delighted: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash#En_dash
I guess you’ll just have to find a different status signal.
Ok... that title should have a comma, not an em dash. If you're going to complain about having them being removed, you have to use them properly at least.
And then " It seems I have two choices now—keep using em dashes with a sort of stubborn, curmudgeonly pride until all my clients stop exchanging money for words, or start writing incredibly long run-on sentences, like this, with commas all over the place … and maybe ellipses too; ideas connected by semicolons. "
That should be a colon after "two choices". (There's also clearly more than two options, one of which does not involve run-on sentences with his otherwise poor grammar. James seems like a shitty prose crafter if he's unable to avoid run-ons.)
There is, of course, quite a bit of tongue-in-cheekiness in that article.
Oh, I get the joke with the second part about the a run-on sentence and intentionally making that grammar mistake; mostly I don't like his hyperbole there and an either-or (the best jokes are the accurate ones). It's mainly the title I loathe for its poor usage of an em dash, which to me doesn't seem to be in on the joke.
I like ellipses, they are best to convey my train of thought.
Although overuse of ellipses leads to text which generates the impression that the writer is constantly sighing. I find that exasperating and tiring to read.
For me it's (often (nested)) parentheses.
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
So it is not AI who forces the author to not use em dashes, but AI haters.
One more reason unformatted text is superior -- the double dash doesn't get autocorrected into an em dash.
I don't know if it's language or a different era, but I've not really used an em dash. I just use a dash. - versus -- and I did not really start seeing it until LLM's.
Just blatant aicism at this point. How else are AI supposed to speak? In blocky digital fonts only?
Oh please, yes. And AI voices must sound like Twiki. Let's keep the world sensible.
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