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Same. It is really annoying to write something and have someone say, “just so you know, em dashes makes it obvious it was written by AI.” You know how else uses em dashes? People who know how to write.
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So... fuck 'em? Hit 'em with a: "You're absolutely right — em dashes are a common signifier of AI" and go about your business. Anyone creating on the internet[1] is running laps around the class of losers who run from post to post dropping useless comments.

[1]: I'd even go so far as to extend that "anyone" to: "anyone creating, even with AI assistance!"

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> It is really annoying to write something and have someone say (...)

It's worse than that. What they are saying is the equivalent to saying that knowing how to do something properly, and having the attention to detail to do so, makes it obvious it was written by AI. It sounds like a prelude to human incompetence, to ensuring that AI products are better than human ones.

About the only semi-convincing argument that I've heard is that AI over uses these tells. But let's face reality here: a lot of people griping about AI generated or AI assisted writing are not looking at over use. Plus a lot of people tend to over use the said tells while they learn how to use them properly.

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I had a throwaway Reddit account get banned from a local subreddit because I used an em-dash when asking: "Do you have an alternative to Facebook — e.g. a mailing list?" The mods' full response when I asked about it was: "AI".

And it really couldn't have been anything other than the em-dash because I've been deleting the account's comments when they were about a week old so there were no previous comments to draw any conclusions from.

I don't care though, I've been using em-dashes since the late '90s making me partly responsible (along with all the other em-dashers) for LLMs being so fond of them, so I'm not going to stop just because of them.

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I'm going back to em dashes after this post, and anybody who calls me out is getting a link to it -- they can suck it up.

That said I've only been on Linux for 25 years so I still haven't figured out how to actually get em dashes and have to resort to the double minus like up there.

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Same. Em dashes have been around a lot longer than AI. Let’s take ‘em (pardon the pun) back!
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It sounds like people ruined them for you — it isn't AI calling you out for using them.
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99 percent invisible did a whole episode about this! https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/658-the-em-dash/
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Don’t let the haters win.
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