[starfezzy]

The lack of em dash usage in popular culture speaks more about typical people than it does about whether a text's author was an LLM. In fact, the average person has never even noticed—let alone considered—that the em dash exists. If they've read for 20+ years, they've seen at LEAST hundreds of them.

Imagine being an NPC (a human bot), flattering yourself with the thought that people who understand the language are language bots...

[ryandrake]

21% of adults in the US are illiterate in 2024 and 54% of adults have a literacy below a 6th-grade level[1]. “The average person” isn’t really a high bar, unfortunately.

1: https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/post/literacy-s...

[andelink]

Is this a legitimate institute? The linked article offers many statistics and even financial figures but cites no sources or studies. There is a “TOLL FREE” (capitalized) phone number in the website footer, and the comments are full of prostitution ads.

[ryandrake]

Wikipedia[1] contains more links to data, if you want to sample a few more sources.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States

[A_D_E_P_T]

Not at all. It's just inconvenient for most of the Windows-using world, as the characters are not accessible. It's ALT+[whatever] or Google-it-and-ctrl+V. Hence an awful lot of internet writing didn't really use any of that stuff properly.

See, e.g., Boss Szabo's blog: https://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2018/03/the-many-tradition...

Two chained hypens, as was pretty much the norm back then.

And did you just call me an NPC?!? It's not a matter of "understanding the language" at all. It's a matter of convenience and of a sort of evolved convention.