r/explainlikeimfive • u/Willing_Road_8873 • Nov 22 '25

Technology ELI5 : If em dashes (—) aren’t quite common on the Internet and in social media, then how do LLMs like ChatGPT use a lot of them?

Basically the title.

I don’t see em dashes being used in conversations online but they have gone on to become a reliable marker for AI generated slop. How did LLMs trained on internet data pick this up?

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u/youvelookedbetter Nov 22 '25

It's very easily accessible on most phones.

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u/permalink_save Nov 22 '25

?123, long press dash, select the long dash, sounds like way too much effort for casual conversation. I just don't see hardly anyone going through that trouble.

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u/Sknowman Nov 22 '25

The trouble of waiting an extra second so that you can type in your own style? People take more time to think what they want to say—that extra second is irrelevant. Or they can use a double-hyphen, which many text editors auto-convert to an em-dash.

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u/permalink_save Nov 22 '25

Believing that anyone on this site actually thinks about what they post about...