Human em dash users, are you still afraid of being mislabeled as "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.

I ... tend to write in a way that gets mistaken for AI ....
yeah me too. it's because i use features such as:
bulletpoints
structured writing (i.e. having an actual structure in the text)

I don't worry about that. There are other markers of AI that are much more reliable:

Extreme verbosity.
Low S/N - i.e. lots of words to say not much at all.
Perfect grammar.
If you drill down into the subject, often completely incorrect - but you don't know without having to read a whole bunch of tedious text.

And here's how you recognize AI:

High-schoolers turning a paper on a subject they know nothing about often fluff up their paper - at least when students still wrote their papers themselves - and hit 1. and 2., but rarely 3.
Good writers always hit 3. They can be terse or verbose, and they may or may not hit 1., but never 2. or 4.
Internet writers don't write like journalists. Only journalists writing for a journal that happens to also publish on the internet write like journalists. Internet writers don't quite hit 3, knowledgeable ones don't hit 2., and almost none of them ever hit 1. Or said another way, when you read something about Linux networking that looks like an Atlantic op-ed, it's AI.

Only AI hits 1., 2. and 3. AI almost always writes in a tone and form that doesn't befit the venue.

As for 4., if you want an example of this, try to search "NFC unlock" on DDG or Bing (same AI-laden Microsoft trash search engine): you will find scores of perfectly-written articles that explain in painful details how you should buy NFC tags (they don't say which), program them (they don't say how), then present the tags to your device (they don't say what devices) to program them to unlock upon presenting the tags.

If you know anything about NFC, you know this is all shades of wrong. But amazingly, each article on the subject is many pages long, perfectly written, and there are countless such articles.

Wow you explained AIs tone and writing very well.
I find it interesting that AI writes very high level, which is a trait that seems to be valued by upper management (VP, CEO level).
- I find it interesting that AI writes very high level, which is a trait that seems to be valued by upper management (VP, CEO level).
  I think at some point someone will figure out that AI would sound more natural if it didn't write so perfectly, and they'll try to make AI sound hip and casual, and I'm almost certain AI will still fail to be convincingly casual.
I thoroughly enjoyed what you did with the formatting there.

Mostly afraid of people realizing I'm an academic. Em-dashes are a dead giveaway.

Default behaviour for Word is to auto correct hyphens to em dashes. It has annoyed me for years.

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. mdash; -> — ndash; -> –
Oh nice Lemmy supports these entities.
- On Typst its --
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.

no way why should i change they're the one that sucks

Found Michael Bolton.

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.

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.

Commas aren't enough on their own, basically. Sometimes you make a sentence which has a comma, but also needs to be divided up in a separate way and place[;| - and] an em dash represents one possible way to do that. More structure is usually better for readability.

I just use the normal ASCII hyphen for it, though. To date nobody has accused me of being AI, and I've been a very light user of AI myself.

What is going on with those faces?! lol

Short answer: No.

Long answer: My somatic reaction tells me to fear the accusation. But I choose not to. My brain tells me I shouldn't be. One - AI or not, em dashes are very helpful in comprehension. Two - why should I change myself just for internet points? Should I purposefully worsen my grammar to satisfy the anti-AI reader?

I don't just use em dashes, I also use en dashes. Take that, robots!

I’ve started using them to mess with people.

🤔

My word processor automatically replaces hyphens with em dashes. Doesn't yours?

Sometimes they'll do it, sometimes they won't. Im not actually sure what the difference is - im hella sure nobody im talking with does either. Screw it.

Nope – but do please kill me if I excessively ram emojis into everything.

💀👍

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.

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!

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! 😩😐

First I've heard of em dashes being an "AI" thing. Aren't LLMs trained on human-generated text? They wouldn't be outputting em dashes if humans didn't also output em dashes.

I heard of it from this video
https://youtu.be/9Ch4a6ffPZY
It's just one of several tells. Although you can't really rely on anything. Just like "badly-drawn hands" is less likely to show up now.
Once I heard this, I had to learn how to type them, btw!
- The badly-drawn hands thing is frustrating because any artist can tell you it's not so easy to draw realistic/accurate hands. So, sometimes you might see genuine art with "weird" hands, and it's painful for the artist to be accused of using AI.
Yes, but most human em dashes are from writing going through relatively professional processes, not, say, writing a comment online. Of course, there are many — like myself — who know how to type them quickly, and choose to use them, but LLMs are definitely a lot more eager to use them than the average person.

I use em all the time, for no particular reason either. I just like how they look. I didn't realise this was a AI detection metric until recently.

I think some of the text ~~used~~ stolen 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.

I didn’t know about em dashes, it was skipped in all my classes decades ago and I just thought the occasional long dash was a font thing.

I’m not used to using them and don’t plan to start

I have someone giving prescribing me something so that I don't. Although that's more cause I worry about so much other stuff that it all but paralyzes me

Very no.

Yes. Even if it's not a reliable indicator, people still associate the em dash with ai and it's simpler to use it less than to explain