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by evanelias 298 days ago
Earlier today, I read a news article about how a historic 100-year-old family-run farm in my state is closing, but the town is buying the land and supposedly keeping it as farmland. The mayor of the town released a statement that included the sentence "This isn’t just a transaction — it’s a testament to our shared values and vision for the future."

It seems we live in a society where our elected officials can't even be bothered to have a hired PR person write their vacuous statements, let alone writing them personally on their own. A vision for the future indeed...

1 comments

It’s pretty common to use a dash in that context. It’s weird that you’d be analyzing punctuation so closely in vacuous press releases.
It's not just the dash, it's the specific construct that's an AI smell, as directly mentioned upthread in the comment I was responding to:

> em dash in the middle of a "it's not just x, it's y" phrasing

Literally all of the sibling comments in this subthread are about this specific phrasing, which AI overuses to an absurd degree, especially when combined with hyperbole.