[fsckboy]

that sounds like one of the worst heuristics I've ever heard, worse than "em-dash=ai" (em-dash equals ai to the illiterate class, who don't know what they are talking about on any subject and who also don't use em-dashes, but literate people do use em-dashes and also know what they are talking about. this is called the Dunning-Em-Dash Effect, where "dunning" refers to the payback of intellectual deficit whereas the illiterate think it's a name)

[Duanemclemore]

The em-dash=LLM thing is so crazy. For many years Microsoft Word has AUTOCORRECTED the typing of a single hyphen to the proper syntax for the context -- whether a hyphen, en-dash, or em-dash.

I would wager good money that the proliferation of em-dashes we see in LLM-generated text is due to the fact that there are so many correctly used em-dashes in publicly-available text, as auto-corrected by Word...

[XorNot]

Which would matter but the entry box in no major browser do was this.

The HN text area does not insert em-dashes for you and never has. On my phone keyboard it's a very lot deliberate action to add one (symbol mode, long press hyphen, slide my finger over to em-dash).

The entire point is it's contextual - emdashes where no accomodations make them likely.

[bee_rider]

Is this—not an em-dash? On iOS I generated it by double tapping dash. I think there are more iOS users than AIs, although I could be wrong about that…

[Duanemclemore]

Yeah, I get that. And I'm not saying the author is wrong, just commenting on that one often-commented-upon phenomenon. If text is being input to the field by copy-paste (from another browser tab) anyway, who's to say it's not (hypothetically) being copied and pasted from the word processor in which it's being written?

[root_axis]

The audio artifacts of an AI generated video are a far more reliable heuristic than the presence of a single character in a body of text.

[dorfsmay]

For now. A year ago they weren't even Gen AI videos. Give it a few months...

[dragonwriter]

Well, its probably lower false positive than en-dash but higher false negative, especially since AI generated video, even when it has audio, may not have AI generated audio. (Generation conditioned on a text prompt, starting image, and audio track is among the common modes for AI video generation.)

[D-Machine]

Thank you for saving me the time writing this. Nothing screams midwit like "Em-dash = AI". If AI detection was this easy, we wouldn't have the issues we have today.

[kelvie]

Of note is theother terrible heuristic I've seen thrown around, where "emojis = AI", and now the "if you use not X, but Y = AI".

[bhaak]

With the right context both are pretty good actually.

I think the emoji one is most pronounced in bullet point lists. AI loves to add an emoji to bullet points. I guess they got it from lists in hip GitHub projects.

The other one is not as strong but if the "not X but Y" is somewhat nonsensical or unnecessary this is very strong indicator it's AI.

[zahlman]

>I guess they got it from lists in hip GitHub projects.

I see this way more often on GitHub now than I did before, though.

[wjholden]

Similarly: "The indication for machine-generated text isn't symbolic. It's structural." I always liked this writing device, but I've seen people label it artificial.

[bee_rider]

Em-dashes are completely innocent. “Not X but Y” is some lame rhetorical device, I’m glad it is catching strays.

[icedchai]

When I see emojis in code, especially log statements, it is 100% giveaway AI was involved. Worse, it is an indicator the developer was lazy and didn't even try to clean up the most basic slop.

[fuzzer371]

No one uses em dashes

[dragonwriter]

If nobody used em-dashes, they wouldn’t have featured heavily in the training set for LLMs. It is used somewhat rarely (so e people use it a lot, others not at all) in informal digital prose, but that’s not the same as being entirely unused generally.

[crimony]

Microsoft Word automatically converts dashes to em dashes as soon as you hit space at the end of the next word after the dash.

[BLKNSLVR]

That's the only way I know how to get an em dash. That's how I create them. I sometimes have to re-write something to force the "dash space <word> space" sequence in order for Word to create it, and then I copy and paste the em dash into the thing I'm working on.

[robin_reala]

Option shift - in macOS (option - gives you an en dash).

[leoc]

Windows 10/11’s clipboard stack lets you pin selections into the clipboard, so — and a variety of other characters live in mine. And on iOS you just hold down -, of course.

[Terr_]

Alt-0151 on the numpad in Windows.

Long-press on the hyphen on most Android keyboards.

Or open whenever "Character Map" application that usually comes with any desktop OS, and copy it from there.

[dboreham]

You can Google search "em-dash" then copy/paste from the resulting page.

[cwnyth]

Ctrl+Shit+U + 2014 (em dash) or 2013 (en dash) in Linux. Former academic here, and I use the things all the time. You can find them all over my pre-LLM publications.

[schrodinger]

I do—all the time. Why not?

I also use en dashes when referring to number ranges, e.g., 1–9

[dboreham]

I didn't know these fancy dashes existed until I read Knuth's first book on typesetting. So probably 1984. Since then I've used them whenever appropriate.

[rmunn]

Except for Emily Dickenson, who is an outlier and should not be counted.

Seriously, she used dashes all the time. Here is a direct copy and paste of the first two stanzas of her poem "Because I count not stop for Death" from the first source I found, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47652/because-i-could...

  Because I could not stop for Death –
  He kindly stopped for me –
  The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
  And Immortality.

  We slowly drove – He knew no haste
  And I had put away
  My labor and my leisure too,
  For His Civility –

Her dashes have been rendered as en dashes in this particular case rather than em dashes, but unless you're a typography enthusiast you might not notice the difference (I certainly didn't and thought they were em dashes at first). I would bet if I hunted I would find some places where her poems have been transcribed with em dashes. (It's what I would have typed if I were transcribing them).

[Finnucane]

Here is an image of the original manuscript page:

https://www.edickinson.org/editions/1/image_sets/12174893

Dickinson's dashes tended to vary over time, and were not typeset during her lifetime (mostly). Also, mid-19th century usage was different—the em-dash was a relatively new thing.

[0xis]

When I type in English and needs an em dash, I simply switch to the Chinese IME.

[awakeasleep]

Except for highly literate people, and people who care about typography.

Think about it— the robots didn’t invent the em-dash. They’re copying it from somewhere.

[amrocha]

My impression of people that say they’re em dash users is that they’re laundering their dunning kruger through AI.

[DocTomoe]

Tell me you never worked with LaTeX and an university style guide without telling me you never worked with LaTeX and an university style guide.

[account42]

Approximately no one writes internet comments or even articles in LaTeX.

[DocTomoe]

But many have built their writing habits about LaTeX typing, and a – or even an — are hardcoded into their text editors / operating systems, much like other correct diacritics and ligatures may be.