[CreepGin]

Holy s@#$! You're right. I didn't catch it at first, probably because it was on the HN frontpage. But yeah, the amount of em dashes (among other things) totally gives it away.

There were so many contradictions in the article, I was going to point them out. Don't see a point now.

[eadmund]

> the amount of em dashes

… means absolutely nothing. I’ve been heavily using them for decades at this point.

The article itself may or may not be AI-generated, but we cannot penalise folks for simply using a stylish bit of punctuation.

[serial_dev]

em dashes are not a crime!

[Sophira]

I would argue that em dashes themselves are not the giveaway that people think they are, and I wish they weren't discriminated against like this.

I was focusing more on what you called "among other things". The way that the article uses English is extremely characteristic of, say, ChatGPT.

[Veen]

As someone who makes a living by writing, this myth about em dashes is annoying. I have always used them. But now I have to avoid them so clients don't think my work is AI-generated.

I don't believe this article is largely AI-generated. It reads to me like the work of every marketer who has learned a list of "best practices" and sticks to them rigorously. It's probably also been edited so it aligns with Grammarly's or Hemingway's view of good writing.

Plus, some people seem to think that any polished, professional writing is LLM-ish because that's the style LLMs often imitate (badly).

[CreepGin]

I feel you. Nowadays I have to use tactical lowercasing and curses here and there to avoid AI-looking responses.

> It reads to me like typical marketing writing.

hmm maybe that's why it rubbed me the wrong way.

[kitten_mittens_]

Why are em dashes a giveaway? They’re auto inserted on Windows for two hyphens still, aren’t they?

[tallytarik]

LLMs seem to use them at a rate far higher than the average person, same with the words “delve” and “robust” (and many others)

[ale42]

Not in every application -- these are two hyphens, Windows didn't touch them.

[ale42]

You don't need to be an AI to use em-dashes. I actually use them quite a lot (even outside of Word) and AFAIK I am not an AI. I just care about text layout and proper use of characters. — is Alt-0151 on Windows (ok you need a keyboard with numeric pad).

[CreepGin]

Well, you may need to worry about them now. It's a well-known issue with the mainstream LLMs. Every few days, you see a new post on reddit from people asking how to get rid of em dashes from ChatGPT, etc.

Even when they are not a telltale-sign, folks are afraid of using them now because of AI. I'm not saying em dashes are bad. Our books are littered with them, and that's why LLMs spit them out consistently.

https://medium.com/@brentcsutoras/the-em-dash-dilemma-how-a-...

[Sophira]

The funny thing is, I wasn't even thinking about the em dashes when I made the initial comment. I had been concentrating on the usage of English in general in the article, which to me is a far more obvious sign of AI generation than the usage of em dashes is.

[CreepGin]

yup, "em dashes" was just easier for me to type to give an example/heuristic. Everything else would require a tad more effort to explain.

I was scratching my head pretty much the whole time during the first read.

[nchmy]

As many others have said, this is silly. I just use hyphens as em-dashes, but their use does not mean that something is AI.