Why em dashes specifically? Why is THAT what we blame on AI?
No, fuck dumbasses who think a dash makes you a computer.
Very. I dont just use em dashes but also tend to write in a way that gets mistaken for AI a bit too much for my liking. In the worst of cases, I have watched AI detection softwares flag my assignments as “high likelihood of being AI generated” despite me not even having used AI for them. Before Chatgpt was mainstream, professors thought that my writing sounded well versed, elonquent and professional, now I just get slapped with an accusation of using AI when I actually didnt.
Mostly afraid of people realizing I’m an academic. Em-dashes are a dead giveaway.
No, I’m not afraid. I’ve been using me-dashes for decades now, and I won’t stop just because some idiots flood the streets with worthless AI junk that happens to copy long-established practices in text formatting.
Yes! 😩😐
Apologies, this is a rant. Please ignore if you are an em dash fan and know that I am not ranting at you, but at its creator.
As someone who has had to deal with comparing text output via automated tests, this thread hurts. I hate Em Dashes and whoever invented them with a burning passion. They make text comparison a nightmare.
“Let’s invent a character that looks exactly like a slightly longer hyphen, but isn’t!” Brilliant. Well done.
Why not just make the hyphen longer instead so people can just type it, like they do with every other character? Nope, instead, let’s invent a different character that can only be typed if you know the Unicode ID.
Even worse is the fact that there are also En Dashes. Because we definitely needed both and couldn’t just type multiple consecutive hyphens to make the line longer…
The worst part is that if you are writing physically, and you’re not a robot, there is no way to distinguish between these at all; they are all just hyphens.
I just use HTML entities to type en and em dashes. — -> — – -> –
Oh nice Lemmy supports these entities.
The character was created specifically because when we write we use different length dashes to mean different things—subtraction through to a pause for thinking.
The automated test will have no difficulty telling them apart. Are you saying it’s hard looking at the results of this tests? You might need to use a font that makes that easy (I agree many monospaced fonts don’t, but that’s not the character’s fault. Or include a step that replaces en with 2 hyphens and em with 3.
AI really loves to steal from fanfiction on sites likeAo3 and blog/forum posts— All places where em-dashes are common. AI uses them because people use them. I’m not going to change how I write because someone else built a plagiarism machine.
I did get accused of using ChatGPT to write something once, based on my use of em-dashes. Kinda just had to laugh though because it was something I’d published in 2014.
Because they fucking stole it from me! I’ll be damned if I let a machine–intelligent or not–force me into changing the way I, an individual, choose to express myself in my own language!
I’ve started using them to mess with people.
No, but it pisses me off as an indie author. I adore em-dashes. Not my fault stupid people who don’t read have never seen them before outside of their crappy AI.
I think some of the text
usedstolen might be from fanfiction, which is where I saw em dashes used to death throughout the years before LLMs became a thing.Silly OP. Humans don’t use em dashes.
At most, their word processor magically turns regular dashes into em dashes and they don’t care enough to change it back.
no way why should i change they’re the one that sucks
Found Michael Bolton.
People have told me for most of my life to talk and write “more normal” so that they wouldn’t have to use a dictionary or think for more than a second about what they’re reading — this is just the latest instance of them looking for a shortcut to disregard anything they don’t immediately understand.
Fuck ‘em.
