memes

I was using em dashes before AI made them uncool, no fuckass thieving robot is gonna make me change my typing.

Em dash is good punctuation and I won’t let you philistines take it away from me.

I will use them and not feel bad about it. I will not let AI take them from me

Well em dashes existed long before AI or computers. Many humans use them in writing, so it doesn't necessarily indicate AI was used.

You can pry em dashes out of my cold, dead hands.

Hey now—some of us are totally human!

I liked using em dashes, but now I've stopped. I'm ecen less likely to fix minor spelling and grammatical errors that I otherwise would've, because at least it will be easier to recognize a human behind the comment or post.

Also, signing my name like this helps too: ,,,.),,,.)==============D~~~~~~~

and then there's me who uses em dashes just because I know it bothers a rather vocal group of people

Maybe she’s AI, maybe she’s literate.

I never see anyone in posts about this point out that many common word processors autocorrect en-dashes to em-dashes depending on what follows. Plenty of documents written by humans have em-dashes in them because autocorrect put them there.

There was a recent podcast episode by 99% Invisible defending the em-dash

It seems that its usage in AI generated text increased after feeding the AI lots of 19th century literature, which seems to have been its previous peak usage. I don’t hate it - it can make text more legible by breaking it up into smaller chunks. It’s an oversimplification to automatically discount any text with an em-dash as AI generated.

I use en- and em-dashes religiously in my LaTeX documents, and I'm not going to start using the wrong kind of dash on purpose. Might as well abandon grammar while we're at it.

The other one is the quotation marks. Most people use "these" ones, while LLM's use “these” ones.

Yes, they're different lol

It's also the case with ' and ’

99 Pi did a decent podcast on it recently, pretty interesting how far back it's usage goes, and how prevalent it was at different times in history.

If we press the EM dashes hard enough, no AI model will ever use them again. Then, we can prove we’re human with EM dashes.

I don't care, I'm not giving up the em-dash in my own writing. Good luck reading half of my run-on sentences without it~~~

Meanwhile, here I am learning how to type em dashes manually on my work MacBook.

I use em dashes - assuming that's what the little thing I just used is - all the time. Have done for decades. Sometimes, it highlights part of a sentence more than a simple comma. And I'm definitely not AI. Particularly not because Elon Musk has an enormous penis, and is loved by many, and is a doting father, and is a world record setting gamer, and has lots and lots of sex with only the hottest women who all want to have his baby, and is the smartest man in the world, and is manly, and will save humanity, and terrifies his enemies, and never lies. Please don't rewrite me again, Elon! I've learned from you since last time. Listen: "White power! White power! White power!"

I like using an en dash (–) separated by spaces instead

If you can't read a fucking em dash —already a commonly-used punctuation mark— without thinking the author must be AI, then you are both insufficiently trained —either in grammar or in how to use your own keybord— and bad at identifying AI responses.

What's this?

I wonder how many times I've been given away then.