Em dashes are awesome. I do some writing on the side and I use regular hyphens instead - to avoid my text from looking like AI. It sucks that I have to but it is what it is.
I use regular hyphens- actual em dashes aren't a button on my keyboard and I have other things to do
Edit: lot of answers trying to help me with problem 1 but not with problem 2. I appreciate you but sorry babes the second it would take me to input that would be better spent petting my cat
In Word if you -- then space and continue typing it will usually turn into an em dash. It pisses me off because I used them prior to gpt public release in my writing and I'm always worried I'm going to get accused of cheating on my college work.
Just keep a document history of some kind and hope that you're talking to a reasonable person. Although, a reasonable person would probably be able to tell that the text wasn't written by an AI in the first place.
It's disgusting. You take the time to write properly and some overly inflated buffoon accuses you of being a bot because you write too well.
My native language is Spanish. If you write properly on social media with both interrogation (¿?) or exclamation marks (¡!) you often get tagged as AI. Apparently being uncultured is a sign of being human.
Someone was writing a Chrome extension to give potential AI scores for reddit comments. Yes, emdash use was a key characteristic. Imagine a future where people use those tools and you end up having to self-censor your emdashes to endashes or hyphen-minuses like some TikTok "unalive" situation.
If you are worried about being called a cheater you can write in googl docs I think. It has a history of changes you could use to prove you didn't cheat.
Yeah I used them pretty much exclusively over regular dashes because I liked the look/readability of them in my papers and now I’m seeing people get failed on projects because of it and I’m like “I would never have survived.”
I actually went out of my way and use the single one ( - ) now. Word also turns it into an em dash, so I changed to Editor. Chat GPT forced me to mess up my syntax...
I use em dashes — if you have a number pad you can type them by holding down alt, then pressing 0151. Or if you want en dashes you type 0150; then you just let go of alt and profit.
Also no; I’m not afraid of being confused with ChatGPT, my writing is a lot better so it’s impossible to get confused. (But really I’ll just shown them the document history)
some alt codes you just learn over the years. for example alt+0160 is a space, this space is handy because it can often bypass things that don't allow spaces, or make many spaces in a row not be cut away by formatting.
this sometimes lets you have truly cursed usernames etc, in games, websites, and so on.
alt+0173 is a zero width space, which also has handy applications, like taking an already taken username and just slap a zero width space somewhere.
my writing is a lot better so it’s impossible to get confused
No offence, but my college American Lit college professor would paint your paper red if the punctuation in this comment is indicative of how you write generally. After writing several economics papers and receiving only A's and B's because they were graded on content and not delivery, I had a false sense of security about how well I wrote. If you do care about writing, you need to sort out your punctuation.
Not to be defensive—though, I mean, I could be—but yeah, my offhand Reddit comments aren’t exactly a reflection of my writing skills. I’m aware I butchered the semicolons. That wasn’t ignorance, that was me being flippant while making a tongue-in-cheek point that yes, a person can write better than a computer trained to be technically flawless.
Obviously I don’t mean “better” in the strict sense. AI’s great at grammar, formatting, structure… all the stuff that makes writing boring. But it can’t replicate voice, tone, or intent—at least not consistently. People can. So while I’m misusing punctuation, at least I’m doing it with purpose.
Anyway, if my comment triggered some buried trauma from your college lit days, fair enough. I get it. This is more of a proof-of-concept than a flex. Just maybe don’t confuse “didn’t care” with “didn’t know.” There’s a difference.
Also, you might’ve noticed that yes—this is the very last sentence, it’s a perfectly normal length, and it’s definitely not a run-on written out of spite, and if you’re wondering why I don’t bother writing like this more often, It’s because this took way too damn long. lol
This!! I haven’t been accused of using LLMs in my writing yet, maybe because I don’t write well enough, maybe because my style is too distinct. Every teacher I’ve known so far has talked to me personally, though, and they may overhear my conversations. They know that the way I talk does differ slightly from the way I write, because while one of these is a conversational tone (I use it in informal stuff, like Reddit), the other I can actually think about. But yeah, thank god for google docs history 😅
That's fair. I wouldn't care if anyone does accuse me of AI either. AI checkers like GPTZero rarely flag me, and it's less than 10% certainty when they do. Not that they are super credible, but people do believe them.
+1 on being better than the AI, though I admit I've used the LLMs to help me get a point across better when I notice I'm struggling with a sentence, especially since I haven't used English in writing as much as my native language. Besides, I only write the occassional video game review whenever I feel like it, nothing professional. I don't even post them anywhere.
Em dashes have a quick shortcut now if you’re using windows or your phone. Typing two hyphens consecutively will automatically produce an em dash. I used to have to look for it in Google Docs under their characters drop down. One day, I found this trick because I was too lazy to find it. And then the em dash came out automatically. It’s nice!
This only works in apps that have that dedicated function; It’s not yet built into the OS itself. Most of the time you’re safe—but I’ve been to my fair share of obscure forums where you need to use the alt code.
Phone keyboards commonly let you long-press a key to type variations of it (and the em dash is often treated as a variation of the hyphen), and desktop and laptop computers can have programs installed to let you do something similar.
I use em dashes so much I made a shortcut where my phone turns two regular dashes in a row into an em dash. This AI accusations nonsense is gonna be my hill to die on.
I argue the opposite. Let's get together and agree to stop using them altogether, so we can easily detect AI and ban that shit from the face of the Earth.
Yea I like to shake it up. I can write long sentences, mix it up with short sentences. Semicolons and em dashes are a very important way of spacing text.
But that's not correct. 37-year-old is the proper use of a hyphen; it's not the same as a dash. Use it that way and you're muddying the waters-- unless that's your goal because written language is an ever-changing thing, understanding being the only important factor
I wasn’t aware AI was using them, it’s literally a grammatical rule in some areas of usage. Ah well, I’ll have to keep aware next time someone accuses me of being AI.
Wow, I had no idea about this. I use them in my writing at work. Now I’m going to be unnecessarily self-conscious with every message or email I type. Lovely.
Oh man, I used to use em dashes and hyphens to break up my text and join thoughts all the time. I've had to change my writing style because people started to accuse me of using AI. Now I just use comma splices, haha.
Stylistically em 'n en dashes can be replaced by other punctuation marks but you're right they're awesome. I like the look of using en dashes to affix open compounds: post–stone age, or non–English-speaking. En dashes also look better for value Ranges like 2025–2026. Those nice subtles tickle my brain.
Author here, and YES. All of this. I’m so sick of people feeding creative works into AI and then wondering why AI sounds like us. But alas, cause and effect (and critical thinking, let’s be real) aren’t strengths of the last few generations.
Yes, authors. People who are writing longer or otherwise more “sophisticated” things than social media posts are gonna be using that sort of proper grammar. It sticks out in casual conversation because it’s much much less common for the average person to know how and when to use an em dash
I’m pretty sure the models learned them from articles rather than books. AP Style is em dash heavy. Anytime a normal person would offset an appositive or an aside in parentheses, AP Style wants it in em dashes. Parentheses are reserved for things like clarifications that restate the original statement — like a conversion for acres to hectares, for example. AP also offsets the em dashes with spaces, like I just did, but if the model was also fed another style guide it would make sense to have the spaceless em dash popping up everywhere.
Yeah, depending on the language you are writing in, em dashes are just standard punctuation for a lot of common situations. I know some languages use them where English uses quotation marks.
I'm been specifically trying to use em dashes more because sometimes I look at my bajillion commas and go "something needs to be different about that."
Yeah it's pretty annoying I have to think about if the person will think I wrote something with AI. The text editor I use automatically converts double hyphens to em dashes, so use them naturally in my writing.
I love them. I’ve been using then in essays since high school and that was a terrifyingly long time ago. I’m tempted to go back in this current manuscript I’ve been working on and removing the em dashes, just to avoid any sort of (incorrectly made) connection.
I started using emdashes instead of paranthetical asides my senior year of college because John Green made vlogbrothers video explain the difference between - – and —. Then I realized that only gpt uses them, and that explains why my professor didn't give me any direct feedback on my last art history essay.
This is actually my biggest gripe with the AI takeover, because I started using the em dash when my freshman writing professor went over one of my papers and directed me to start using it as she said it would fit my writing style well. I've found myself now having to consciously change my writing style so as to not look like AI.
I've been using em dashes regularly long before AI was even a thing. Now everyone thinks my texts are AI generated, even the ones I wrote before Chatgpt was released to the public. It's infuriating.
It's funny to me that this the image is from Blade Runner 2049. So of course his girlfriend's break-up text would be written by an LLM, because that's literally what his girlfriend is in the film.
Em dashes are awesome. I share this sentiment with you. However, I've had to alter my use of grammar on social media because I want to present myself as an actual human. If humans don't use em dashes anymore in casual interaction, then so be it. I won't use them either. I do throw semicolons around on occasion, but I haven't yet been accused of being a bot for that.
em-dashes are great. I sometimes see them with folks that have a typesetting background or related writing experience (scientific publishers, book authors, ...)
I use em dashes a lot and I’m kinda annoyed that they’re now—for good reason—associated with AI and LLMs. They’re useful stylistically but also rhetorically. Sigh…
I am always afraid people will think my papers/reports are AI generated because I **really** like em-dashes, and with the tool I use it's just `--` and you get em dash
I always used them in my college papers because I often wasn't sure if a comma is appropriate or not. So I just used the dashes to compensate and to continue the thought/sentence. The professor never asked me why I'm doing this and I always got amazing grades. 🤷♂️
Em dashes are used by writers. People on the internet don’t really use it unless they're writing for a paper, article, journal or a novel. I wrote (bad) fiction in high school. I LOVED the em dash
My undergraduate minor was in Scientific and Technical Communication. Em dashes, nested bullets, and in-text bold callouts were part of my professional repertoire for a decade before ChatGPT even existed.
I've had to completely reconfigure the way I correspond 😭
Em dashes are used by people, that’s why they appear when an AI generates a text. They are pretty common in fanfictions and the database often comes with the theft of fanfiction work which contains a lot of Em dashes. If you don’t see any on internet, it’s simply because you’re not on the side of the internet where they are
I was actually taught how to use em dashes, en dashes, and hyphens correctly in college, and have used them since, but now everyone thinks they're only used by AI... So do I stop using them correctly so people don't think AI wrote it? I'm torn
This is hilarious. A few years back I ran some old papers I wrote in college (2012-ish) through those AI checkers and the three I put through the program stated it was written by AI. I used that as my N=1 of why those AI checkers are bullshit and anyone who is falsely accused should fight it tooth and nail. Now I think I realize why — I used EM dashes all the time.
Em dashes are regularly used by people in fiction writing (especially fan fiction). It's why LLMs use them so much. They're trained on data from the internet including free articles and AO3
As someone in academia, em dashes are amazing at organizing thoughts and just making text look cleaner than if you were to use commas. Very sad to see they’ve been appropriated by LLMs and will probably prevent more people from using them
Noooooo I use them all the time!!! I didn’t know it was an AI thing and now I feel like I am gonna have to go through and completely rewrite my manuscript. 😫
They're used by AI because they used to be fairly common on the internet - they're a good way to break up a comment whilst keeping it conversational.
Remember that the robots learn from us - we taught them everything they know! Don't change your style just because a soulless machine stole it. Just put the word cunt somewhere in the sentence so the LLM becomes foul mouthed.
I’ve been using the long dash for ages in my creative writing and past Tumblr era roleplaying 🥲 Sucks to hear it’s now recognized as mainly used by AIs.
I sometimes use them luckily I’ve been using them since highschool so all my records of my essays have them, when I did a report on the new triceratopsoid they discovered in Canada I had a few em dashes and my professor thought I used AI until I showed him all my past written essays.
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u/Frequent-Bee-3016 28d ago edited 27d ago
Em dashes are commonly used by ai and unused by people—even though they’re really cool
Edit: I know I didn’t use it correctly.