Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can we please stop using the em-dash as a metric to “detect” LLM writing? It’s lazy and wrong. Plenty of people use em-dashes, it’s a useful punctuation mark . If humans didn’t use them, they wouldn’t be in the LLM training data. There are better clues, like the kind of vague pretentious babble bad marketers use to make their products and ideas seem more profound than they are. It’s a type of bad writing which looks…
Very few people use n dashes in internet writing as opposed to dashes as they are not available on the default keyboard.
Furthermore, on macOS there are simple key combinations (e.g. with ⌥) to make all sort of smart punctuation even if you don’t have the feature enabled by default, and on iOS you can long press on a key (such as the hyphen) to see alternates.
The majority of people may not use correct punctuation marks, but enough do that assuming a single character immediately means they used an LLM is just plain wrong. I have never used an LLM to write a blog post, internet comment, or anything of the sort, and I have used smart punctuation in all my writing for over a decade. Same with plenty of other HN commenters, journalists, writers, editors, and on and on. You don’t need to be a literal machine to care about correct character use.