But people at work who are copying responses from LLMs into emails to others also suck, and I want to distance myself from them as much as possible. I'm kinda hoping we will eventually have a wave of "what the fuck are we paying you for if you're just copying stuff from an LLM to Slack" firings.
So maybe tweaking your usage (ex. no spaces around them) or using a technically incorrect en-dash might offer the desired effect while subtly signaling that your message isn't AI-generated.
I still use them — mostly for pauses — but I'd like to think my voice sounds distinct enough from an AI that people can tell.
(disclaimer: I feel like this obsession with dashes is special to native English speakers, which I'm obviously not)
The en dash is also used in things like scores (3–2 Turkey), votes (the bill passed 58–42), or connecting words where the second part is longer than one word (the Australia–New Zealand alliance.) You can remember the latter as, "a hyphen isn't big and strong enough to hold on to more than one word.
If you're on a mac, pressing Option+- is the en dash and Option+Shift+- is the em dash.
However I've only ever used regular dashes. How do you type an em-dash? Is it OS specific? I've taken to using Emacs insert-char with a list of frequently used ones in my scratch buffer. My memory for Unicode is unreliable.
On Linux X11 at least, you can enable the Compose key and then press `<Compose>---` which results in — and `<Compose>--.` which gives you –
On iOS you type it by pressing dash and holding until alternative options come up, same way you type e.g. accented characters.
Why go the extra way to have a slightly elongated dash when a normal one would just as well do the job?
I might be conpletely off here but I've never seen a situation where using a normal dash where a long one should be causes any sort of syntactic trouble.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/em-dash-en-dash-how-...
Just because you don't care to use the proper dash doesn't mean everyone else doesn't. People have different levels of caring about different details. For the sticklers, there's even a special code point for ellipsis, … rather than .... (Four being correct, as one is to end the sentence.) Personally I'll just skip — entirely unless I'm in a trolling mood, though “sometimes” the right quotes are worth using. Special characters are easy to type on a phone soft keyboard, taking a long press on the relevant key, or if you're using any other advanced input system, so they shouldn't really be considered to be the mark of LLM input.
The real trouble is that people doing engage with the substance of the post anymore, and just shallowly dismiss a post as being vibe written, as if that makes any points raised invalid. Anti-intellectualism's always been cool among a certain crowd. Shame to see it spread but ah well, the propaganda's working.
I had to look up why this exists, and apparently it was added in Unicode 6.1 (2012) because some style guide required it, and using consecutive U+2014 em dashes isn't sufficient because that might not render as one continuous line.
And if it ever catches on with LLMs ⸻⸻ we just make it longer