[jdw64]

I feel like people only look at the form and ignore the substance of the content. Honestly, as long as the content itself is well written and the em-dash is used correctly, I don't think it really matters.

When I first learned about em-dashes, I was told they were a mark of sophisticated, intellectual writing. But now people say they sound like AI. Is that really a bad thing?

It's strange to see sophistication become low-class just because AI uses it. It makes me think that form is really about who the author is, not the form itself.

In that sense, I'm not sure what it even means to be 'human-like.' Being human-like just feels like an illusion that people who want to believe in it keep insisting on

[ssivark]

> people only look at the form and ignore the substance of the content.

This is largely because most people are incapable of thinking critically and evaluating substance. So they regress to indirect markers of good writing, and the whole thing becomes a game of signaling.

The rot is so deep, many popular resources on writing focus more on style and presentation than focusing on the substance of writing. And even when best-intentioned, all this does is make poor writing a bit more palatable by giving it a veneer of polish.

[KPGv2]

This is generally the way it's always been. As evidence, observe the plethora of guides like Strunk & White for the entirety of the 20th century. This time period not only included the moon landing, but also the final decades of the third European Renaissance. You'd be hard-pressed to identify a time period that was jam-packed with brilliance.

Guides such as S&W focus entirely on style. Then we have the dearth of guides on composing a good sentence.

Of course, S&W is also filled with insanely stupid advice. "Don't split an infinitive" immediately comes to mind. Ask yourself which sounds more powerful, oh fellow geeks:

* To go boldly where no one has gone before

* To boldly go where no one has gone before

Split infinitive form is so much better. "Don't split an infinitive" is one more smooth-brained 19th century rule invented by Latin-obsessed weirdos who thought it was the perfect language, and that they should impose Romance grammar on Germanic languages. (See also "don't end a sentence with a preposition" and "don't start a sentence with a conjunction.")

I agree that post-COVID we have a glaring issue with the problem you highlight, but I don't think the focus on orthography is a symptom. Long ago, my dad criticized my résumé because I didn't put two sentences after periods despite me using a variable-spaced font. The man's nearly eighty. He's not exactly some 21st-century miseducation case.

One caveat I'll add at the end is that focusing on form isn't always bad. Form is one of the great joys of reading both poetry and prose. Word selection is often form rather than substance. The opening lines of Lolita are pure form. Nabokov could've easily just said "I'm a pedophile and Lolita is attractive to me." Instead, he chose words that have you overuse your tongue when you sub-vocalize, making the text feel uncomfortably erotic to a normal, non-pedo reader.

[brazzy]

> This is largely because most people are incapable of thinking critically and evaluating substance.

No, with AI it's because it's MUCH faster than evaluating substance, and fast ways to weed out AI slop are desparately needed, since it can be produced so quickly.

[KPGv2]

It's also infinitely more error-prone. All form-based heuristics are horrible for detecting AI because the one thing AI is damn near perfect at is writing like an actual human.

It's the thing it was trained to do. The entire decades-old architecture has exited for specifically that purpose. That second "L" in "LLM" is "language" for a reason.

[brazzy]

Yes, but the desparate need is specifically for quick and easy ways to detect AI. If it's error-prone that's unfortunate, but better than nothing. A slow, laborious way, on the other hand, is useless because it doesn't achieve the goal of reducing the workload.

[sarreph]

I too find it a pity that the em-dash has been co-opted by AI. I use a double-hyphen ("--", the old school way of writing it), but fear that this will also become used by AI seeking a higher form of 'sophistication' as you put it.

We're experiencing broad scale changes in the sentiment of style in written English. I don't know what the best approach to take here is necessarily, but the more I see language evolving over time (especially over the past two decades) I think I'd prefer to shift my habits in line with whatever the "modern standard" is in order to avoid falling into pitfalls, i.e. being accused of being an AI writer.

[1718627440]

> ("--", the old school way of writing it)

The old school of writing it in digital documents. Typesetting predates and is not limited to digital documents.

[sarreph]

Good point, but I think it's a little more complex than that.

To my knowledge (and what I meant by "old school"), it was common to type a "--" dash on typewriters[0] because most of them lacked en- and em-dashes, which are obviously not digital documentation devices.

But yes, typesetters of old (old, old school!) had myriad glyph blocks available to them for pressing!

--

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typewriter#Typewriter_conventi...

[1718627440]

On a typewriter you can write symbols overlapping, so if you write '--' it becomes '–'.

[sarreph]

Sure... But overstriking takes more time and effort, which is why "--" was the convention.

[Telemakhos]

The double-hyphen is by no means "old school": it's a kludge for twentieth-century systems like typewriters and word processors that did not have em dashes or an easy way to insert them. The very names "em dash" and "en dash" should illustrate their age: they go back to the fifteenth century, and "em" and "en" were standard printing widths in moveable type. People who write CSS still recognize em as a width.

The idea that a double-hyphen is "old school" is on par with the false notion that double-spacing between sentences is a product of the typewriter; one need only look at a typeset book from before the twentieth century to see the truth, or look at a decent image of the Declaration of Independence or other hand-written document from prior centuries to see the extra space left between sentences.

Many of the changes we see in written English style are the product of ignorance of the past beyond two generations or so. Avoiding em-dashes to keep up with the latest anti-AI fad is just reacting mindlessly to the stimulus of popular ignorance instead of deliberately situating one's style in the history of writing conventions.

[sarreph]

As per sibling comment, I think my "old school" wording is getting misconstrued here. I did mean 20th-century "old school", i.e. typewriters... Is the Late Middle Ages considered "old school"? :)

Agreed that in terms of precedent, typesetters had moveable type dashes for their presses.

> the fifteenth century, and "em" and "en" were standard printing widths in moveable type. People who write CSS still recognize em as a width.

This is very interesting!

[KPGv2]

I'm going to write my response using vernacular English so as to avoid AI claims, so pardon my French.

> We're experiencing broad scale changes in the sentiment of style in written English.

Lol no we're not. The only people who give a fuck about this em dash AI bullshit are losers on Tumblr and commenters on fanfiction sites who are obsessed with the idea that AI is the current Great Evil.

This is the orthographical equivalent of the New York Times running an article that soy-glazed avocado bouillon is the latest trend among Millennials because, like, one of the editors caught their college dropout son eating it one morning at the family table. Son said "duh dad everyone's doing it" to fuck with his dad, and next thing you know, a hundred think pieces on Mexican-Japanese breakfast being trendy.

I've never met an adult in my professional or personal life who actually gives a shit about this. We're talking a fraction of a percent of people who don't want you to use AI, and a fraction of that who waste their life trying to detect it.

Write the way you want. If people can read it, that's all that matters.

Apologies for the French. Blame Canada.

*Edit* Also the em dash is based. Using a double dash should be a prison sentence.

[dxdm]

As of recently, there is a strong correlation between use of em-dashes and a verbose, bloated style of writing that uses many words to not quite get to multiple repeated points. Not well written, in other words.

The combination of both I usually find in text generated for me by LLM, and so far, it serves as a good signal for density of information and, inversely, not-quite-right ideas and their connections. (That's not to say it's pervasive, but below the surface, the quality of LLM text as a medium is often not great.)

There may be well-written text of non-trivial length generated by LLMs, but so far I haven't knowingly encountered any, with or without em-dashes. Human editing remains very necessary.

[brazzy]

The problem is that the substancelessness of AI writing nowadays tends to be subtle and well-hidden (but huge). Focusing on superficial "tells" is basically an attempt of a quick, cheap defense against the imbalance of human effort, where someone can spend a few dollars and a few minutes and e.g. generate dozens of PRs that would take many hours of real human effort to process and fix the deeper shortcomings of.

[nephihaha]

The em-dash-as-AI trope is nothing new. (Apart from the fact that MS Word etc convert them automatically.)

If I post some information, then I have had people accusing me of cribbing it off Wikipedia. When I have translated from some languages, people assume I'm using Google. Even though in one case, the language in question wasn't even available on Google Translate. (I went and checked.)