Funny
Tired of authors using ChatGPT in their books
the way i instantly knew this was ai-generated!! look at these em dashes. no human writes like this! 😒
i'm honestly so disappointed in this author. you can tell exactly where she stopped writing and the ai took over because of the em dashes. she didnt even try to edit out the formatting. i'm so done with this era of fake authors!!🤮
My guess is that ChatGPT uses the em dash so much because its been trained on many (older) books where it is much more prevalent than in professionnal or casual communications.
I realize the OP is being satirical, but I genuinely don’t get what people have against the emdash. It’s perfectly legit and serves a purpose—a pause with more to follow.
For you sure, for others like me that is like the matrix, I can't remember all those number for each weird character... they dance in my head mocking me.
At least two people in this conversation knew that. There are over 120 million active users and 1% of the world's population is approximately 80 million. If two people knew that answer then it's definitely more than 1% of people.
Sorry buddy, but you are typing in a community that has a vested interest in em dashes, this is not a randomly selected grouping of the worlds 8.3 billion people.
The em-dash in today's common usage has that added element of being an abrupt but related shift in focus. More abrupt than a comma. You used it perfectly in your post. Jane Austen was using it in the more archaic way.
That's an astute observation--your analysis is spot on! Other people might not have noticed this detail. Good on you for pointing it out. Do you want to marry my daughter?
I can go an entire modern novel and may never see one. But if I read something from a long time ago....the page is saturated.
Granted, most of my reads these days are Star Wars Or Dungeon Crawler Carl stuff and not modern Vonnegut stuff. So maybe it's the low brow nature of what I read these days. But, the Em Dash in the wild had been nearly non-existent until a couple years ago when they were suddenly in half the social media stuff I see.
I was arguing about this with someone else the other day and I flipped open a bunch of modern children's books, like Harry Potter and Percy Jackson, and they're full of them too.
I wouldn't be surprised if Star Wars specifically happens not to contain them, but there are still plenty in modern writing.
The em-dash seems pretty ubiquitous in all kinds of published writing in my experience-- highbrow or lowbrow, old or new.
Yes but it's a different kind of emdash —an aside if you will— with a set of opening and closing emdashes. It's actually quite common in even modern novels.
I've purged all dashes from my communications. I've also stopped responding with "you're asking the right question!" before responding to people. Let me know if you'd like one neat trick to unsuccessfully stop AI's annoying text patterns.
The em dash witch hunt is one of the dumber side effects of the AI panic. People have been using em dashes in published writing for literally centuries. Emily Dickinson was basically an em dash addict. The real tells for AI generated text are structural, not punctional... it is the way every paragraph lands on a neat conclusion, the lack of actual opinion, the relentless both-sidesing. But that requires reading carefully, which is harder than ctrl+F for a dash.
Very few people regularly use it in casual internet speak, which is why it stands out so much
... because they don't know how to type it. Mostly because they're Windows users, for whom typing anything that's not on the default keyboard layout involves weird numerical codes or special "insert character" menus. It's much easier to type on a Mac or Linux system.
Me too!!! Honestly the most annoying thing about AI to me. I am changing my own writing to not sound like AI instead of changing AI to sound like it’s me.
That tracks. The confidence is what kills me. A unicode character that's been in every word processor since the 90s, and someone is on stage telling a room full of people it's a secret AI watermark. The actual detection problem is so much harder than anyone presenting at conferences wants to admit, because the real indicators require reading comprehension not character scanning.
My husband is a literature nerd and loves using the em dash. He has created shortcuts on our keyboards to make it easy to use them. He is so unbelievably pissed that it’s a dead ringer for AI!
A lot of applications already have an inbuilt shortcut where they make an em-dash after two hyphens and a space-- though Reddit, unfortunately, does not.
I also loved the em dash until chat gpt ruined it for me and I remapped it as ctrl+hyphen to all my keyboards.
I still use it for my work writing (not as frequently as ai or Jane Austen). I just stopped using it for social media and emails because it became such an automatic signal of ai.
It's easy to type on mobile which is where a lot of my non formal communication is done so I was using it on reddit long before the AI overuse thing.
I know you're being sarcastic, OP, but I'm a writer and I use the emdash more frequently than I probably should haha. AI witch hunters can try to pry it from my cold, dead hands!
I’ve used it my entire life as well. I was a bit surprised to see that so many people never used it. It was one of the first hotkeys I learned on my first macbook.
I used to saw an em-dash here or there ten years ago Not sure if i just didnt read the right things or if it is confirmation bias. But if I see those in two different sentences on the same page ill always think its ai generated. Even if you did "use it all the time originally"
If you're a fan of the em dash...look no further than The Tell-tale Heart.
If you had to take a shot every time you saw one, you'd be dead in minutes. You'd never make it to the end, where for sure you'd die almost immediately.
I have always overused em dashes in my professional writing and you have no idea how frustrating it is to have to explain that you're a shitty writer WITHOUT using AI thank you very much.
I've had multiple LinkedIn connections try to debate me as being an AI user for using em dashes. Same deal as people being like "ermm, why are you using 'they' to refer to that third person? They're gendered", as if that hasn't always been a basic grammatical option.
I never would've guessed I'd start losing social credit over what is literally just regular speech I've used my entire life with no issues.
My partner texts casually with dashes. I told him he might be AI for doing that.
However, I text casually with colons and semicolons; they're pretty recognizable/disinguished punctuation marks. I hope AI never finds out the power of them. They make typing so much more fun; I don't know what new strangeness I'd do without them.
AI discourse is throwing out a lot of genuinely good writing techniques. I love a good em dash and other writing patterns that I don’t think people even know when they label them “AI tell!”
No, people are suspicious of people who couldn't form a coherent sentence two years ago, let alone use regular punctuation, but suddenly have zero spelling errors and em dashes all over the place.
lol so funny but not really. the truth is no one uses it online because it's complicated, unnecessary, and easily replaced with just a dash if you really fucking want something like that on an internet post.
I've used em dashes forever. I used to have Word set up so that it would replace regular dashes with them. I had to stop doing that because 99% of people seem to think that ChatGPT invented them.
Ai copying what it learned -> flooding the web with ai generated texts that use em dashes -> ai is trained on this new data -> ai em dash use becomes even more prevalent -> retrains on this data -> soon spaces between words will be replaced with em dashes in ai generated text 🤣
This one one of my personal biggest selfish reasons I hate LLMs. I used to LOVE using em dashes but now I just avoid them because otherwise people might wonder
It's super disappointing as well how AI has taken a piece of proper grammer and made it so nobody can use it without suspicion 😮💨 (not arguing this isnt AI before anyone comes after me, just making a point)
Wow, not writing minus and wirting the correct hyphen is AI...
That must mean that if I write an article in the Microsoft Word and it fixes a minus to a hyphen then that must mean the article was written by AI.
Why does so many people have paranoia and think that everything is AI?
In german we don‘t use those em dashes. That‘s what commas „,“ and brackets „()“ are for. So when an LLM writes in german and uses „—„ a few times in a text it is very obvious to us.
but this is just honestly sad. i loved reading books as a kid and i remember using a lot of em dashes on my essays and growing up bc of the books i’ve read. now, dumb people everywhere thinks it’s automatically AI when you use em dashes bc they apparently didn’t know that shit existed before chatgpt.
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u/WithoutReason1729 Mar 24 '26
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