Em dashes are amazing

Nope. The best tell isn't any single given character, but the general flow of the prose. I find "it's not X - it's Y" or "No X. No Y. Just Z and W." to be stronger tells than the mere presence of emdashes.

Hell, overuse of emoji is more of a tell than the mere presence of emdashes. The problem here is really "AI detection" services that themselves use AI to perform the service. More than one person has fed pre-AI text to such a detector only to be told "this is 75% AI" or some shit. Students who didn't use AI have been near harassed by their teachers because the teacher used some kind of AI-based AI detector, and it hallucinated. People want to believe the computer because they think "oh the computer is objective" and throw out all logic afterwards. Unfortunately, the rise of AI has brought subjectivity to computers, in the worst possible way.

You see the same thing with the family who got accosted in California by multiple police vehicles coming out of a retail store, because somebody in New Jersey lost a dealer tag and entered a partial tag number in the report, which ended up being fed to Flock's search engine, which then provided the partial search results it was asked to. Everyone along the way trusted the computer as if it was the single source of truth, but that "source of truth" was tainted by incorrect input. Literally GIGO on a life-altering scale. Other people were already being watched. It was just probability, to the point where that family probably had equal probability to win the multi-state lottery jackpot.

Go watch the Computer Chronicles episode on AI. It's very prescient. The main issue is that currently, people treat AI as if the problems brought up in that episode have been resolved, when they haven't at all.

Use of AI is fine as long as there is human review along every step of the process. Anyone using AI as a shortcut to actually doing the work they're paid to do needs to be removed from whatever situation they're involved in at the earliest convenience. Otherwise it's just an expose on the fact that humans are somehow intrinsically lazy, despite the outliers of the hardworking person (which does exist, I've known people who would move mountains to make what you need done possible, and the rest are just pivoting to AI to fake it).

Fake it until you make it, I feel, is the core of modern "AI". People also forget that AI as a field is much older than modern generative AI.

That seems to be the case with linguistic- and group practices in general. It's not universal law, and while the overlap of correctness and even best practice is pretty big, there are still differences. Subject matter, language, abstract institution (universities), concrete ditto (Oxford, Chalmers, Max Planck IoT, Royal Academy of {country}), register/style (daily newspaper, tabloid), etc.

> So you're lining them up, slowly running out of 'e's and 'f's and 'r's. You decide to save yourself some time and more importantly some of your precious few letters that you need to make last the whole page. So you omit some of those words, names in this case, and establish a convention with other printers and authors about how and when to replace words with shorthand. This lets you and your fellow printers save time by not having to work to arrange those admittedly duplicate letters and stretch those letters.

Seriously? You're claiming printers invented shorthand and abbreviations to make working with movable type easier? They were common in handwriting and predate the printing press. Look! Even the Wikipedia page for abbreviation has an illustration from scribal handwriting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbreviation.

> Fun fact, that's why old 's' are sometimes written with an 'f' missing the bar. Because they were re-using forms where otherwise a letter was so common they'd run out!

No, that's from handwriting, invented in the 8th century (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s). Go read the original handwritten copies of the US Constitution or Declaration of Independence. You don't have to read far until you find a long s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Declaration_of_I... (necessary, 3rd line/1st line of cursive)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Constitution_of_the_Unite... (bessings, 2nd line)

In conclusion, everything in your comment is totally wrong.

I honestly agree with the arguments they made to defend it, but then they tied themselves in loops trying to defend things like separate Greek and Cyrillic scripts and making superfine distinctions about how that isn't the same phenomenon. But they couldn't merge those scripts together now even if they wanted to, because of the stability policy. And the existence of the blackletter, small-caps, superscript, etc. characters seems entirely indefensible to me. All font rendering issues; it's clearly the same symbol with the same fundamental meaning.

Really, they needed to come up with the idea of variation selectors way earlier, and use them aggressively. And design something more consistent for character composition, and skip the precomposed characters (those really are glyphs representing a cluster; being able to treat the cluster as an atomic entity versus its components doesn't add actual semantic information to the text).

I honestly couldn't tell if the author was writing satire (about AI writing detection?) or is just an idiot who doesn't understand why we have language rules to facilitate communication.

I want to think it's the latter, but it's so exquisitely stupid I keep thinking it's "stupid on purpose".