Well screw all of us that like using em dashes, I guess.

The people I know that were using special dashes since before AI were all technical and precise writers (which is probably why they paid attention to it in the first place).

I've never seen this unique mix of listicle-like light-hearted fluff with emojis AND special dashes written by humans. LLMs seem to love it, though.

Keep using the em-dash with pride! Don't let the AIs steal such a beautiful thing from us!

It doesn't have em-dashes and although a list where each line starts with an emoji is very LLM-coded, the lack of capitalization after the dashes does not feel like LLM output. And if something isn't plainly LLM generated, I do not want to accuse it of such. That's incredibly insulting to the author if they didn't actually use an LLM.

>the lack of capitalization after the dashes does not feel like LLM output

Em-dashes do not start a new sentence. Lack of capitalization is correct, and LLMs generally get spelling/punctuation/grammar right.

There are two types of "long" dashes, and it is using the other one (en-dash).

Not to mention the two-em-dash (U+2E3A) and three-em-dash (U+2E3B).

I agree that it feels LLMish (though the LLMs learned it from humans and it's always possible that whoever wrote it just has that sort of style) but the dashes there are en-dashes rather than the longer em-dashes that LLMs seem particularly fond of.

I will be sad if en-dashes come to be seen as LLM fingerprints, because I rather like them.

When I'm writing, I've always used en-dashes, but only because it's on my keyboard. Until people recently started talking about this, I didn't realize there was such a thing as en and en-dashes.

FWIW I think the - character on qwerty keyboards is a hyphen, which is a smidge shorter than an en dash

- – —

On a Mac it’s easy to type n and m dashes using option and the hyphen key.

It's common knowledge that em-dashes are a sign of LLM writing. This incentivizes anybody who generates slop to manually search and replace with a different dash or hyphen in an attempt to hide what they did.

As I wrote recently on my own blog site:

> This is for those who insist they can easily spot AI-generated text. Many of us old farts were using bulleted lists and em dashes and en dashes long before artificial intelligence was no more than a (usually) reliable plot device for sci-fi, much less the fever dream of tech bros. So, for God’s sake, stop using those as “proofs” that some text is AI-generated. As for my own writing, I reiterate what I said over two years ago: “... although the stuff on this site ... may not be any good, it always has been and will be written by a human, namely me.”

Stop this. I use em-dashes all the time. Em dashes are cool and I don't want some knob to eventually accuse me of being "an AI" because of this kind of thing. :{

that's might also be false positive, I use languagetool for grammar/spelling correction and one of the corrections it to replace dashes with em-dashes