Em dashes are amazing

As a few have pointed out, many writers have been using it usefully since long before the blight.

The current state of revolt is probably a phase though, as models will learn to account and adjust for the litany of literary crimes they've been committing. In some ways we are fortunate to have such easy signals to work with while, already, false positives are becoming almost as common as actual positives, indicating it might not be long before we just can't tell anymore. Which would suck, but then we'd have to adjust the nature of our complaints to something more profound, something more... insidious, something.... Maybe Woodrow Wilson? [0]

It's not only the emdash that threatens the quality of our dialog and linguistic welfare — it's many principles, such as the the Rebuttle>Reframe>Prescribe structure of this very sentence. Once is a lot, but multiple instances of this structure in a single comment would be worse than swallowing a double hyphen sideways.

The LLM is methodical, deliberate, unhurried — in a way that rewards the vigilance, attention and patience required to spot compulsions, such as the Rule-of-Three seen here.

It's important to catch and worth noting each instance of filler-transition that adds little information while working toward word-counts.

Undoubtedly, if we want to make our world safe for the emdash once again, we certainly should not overlook overused intensifiers posing in places where real work should be.

While such examples can be found in legitimate human-written texts, they can also be found in LLM generated texts, and this Reflexive false balance style sentence is suggesting we just can't always be sure.

Consider a person suffering generic example syndrome, where instead of naturally recalling a situation from actual memory, an example might be synthesized from some statistical category, seeming a bit out of place.

And do not forget sentence length clustering around a mean, which humans have a tendency to naturally avoid.

Frictionless surfaces might also hint the involvement of LLMs, where the final structure may be suspiciously clean of normal human quirks.

Of course, the ultimate question here isn't even being asked, and the emdash is not a registered trademark of LLMs. It's not about whether we should fear using them, or even their value — it's about this Symmetrical closing that despite being written by a human (maybe subhuman) has strong patterns of an LLM.

0. “Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men's views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.”

Wilson went a bit farther than might have an LLM. But who knows, the future may bring new rules, perhaps even a rule of 6.

https://youtu.be/ZEJBBlRlhAU?t=251

As other people have commented, it's partly a relic of an era where things were typeset by hand. Some journals may also require this in their style guide; I don't know of any offhand but the list of journals is long and their choice of style is varied.

> I dunno, do people actually read through a citation list, in a manner where the redundancy would be relevant?

Yes, they do. When you work on a Ph.D.-level dissertation, you end up having to learn your subfield pretty well: its major works, open questions, current major players, their ongoing arguments, etc. You start to notice citations cluster, and you can often find more than one opinion group. People you have to listen to (ie: your advisor / committee) will hand you articles with authors you don't know and who may come from labs that you don't know. One common way to start orienting yourself is to look at who they cite.

You pick up patterns: some people love to cite themselves and their friends, some people really try to give a detailed overview of the state of the field, and some people go out of their way to attack their rivals via citation. Sometimes the reference list has an author or work you don't recognize, and might have missed while glancing over the text. Mostly it's something mildly relevant and occasionally it's an exciting direction to look into.

The really long citation lists, where the triple emdash would make sense, mostly occur in fields outside science and engineering where knowledge is exchanged through chapters and books. Some fields expect a lot of detailed textual analysis which can involve a lot of careful citation of the same chapter or book over and over again.

While I've never worked in these fields, I've been friends and roommates with people in them, and I quickly learned that bibliographies are way more of a thing for them than I ever imagined.