Interesting concept that attempts to solve a problem I wasn't aware of, AI's overuse of the Em-Dash. I'm curious about other markers to proof human authorship.
spelling and grammar mistakes
You can easily prompt ai to do that
Amdash – Human only punctuation mark
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Re: Amdash – Human only punctuation mark
#22It’s a rough time for those of us who have always used en- and em-dashes and who structure documents with bullet points. I’m fortunate that writing comes easily and quickly, but these days probably most people who read my docs assume it’s AI. I can’t bring myself to abandon my beloved em-dashes though.
Happening the same here too. I usually write to the point and regularly number or bullet my key points. I also love to use “–”, Oxford comma, and curl all of my quotes. Now, I’ve to prove that I’m not using AI with my emails.
Re: Amdash – Human only punctuation mark
#23It’s a rough time for those of us who have always used en- and em-dashes and who structure documents with bullet points. I’m fortunate that writing comes easily and quickly, but these days probably most people who read my docs assume it’s AI. I can’t bring myself to abandon my beloved em-dashes though.
I’ve started writing “--“ and not letting autocorrect change it to be “—“
Re: Amdash – Human only punctuation mark
#24It's a font that morphes the text fragment "am-" into the curly dash using a ligature.
https://chriscoyier.net/2025/05/10/the-am-dash/
But that won't help for long. If the Amdash becomes popular, then AI will pick it up, because "am-" is just a text fragment and AI can learn to produce it.
Even worse if a future version of Unicode adopts the Amdash, then nothing will stop AI.
Or the opposite happens as one already said here: Nobody will use the Amdash.
Re: Amdash – Human only punctuation mark
#25I'm not sure what stops AI from using this punctuation mark. They don't seem to scruple from plagarism or copyright violation.
I believe it's because the actual text behind the font would say "Here's a statementam-and here's a diversionam-and back to the original statement." Problem is, it's only useful if you're using those specific fonts. Now I've gotta teach my grandpa how to install a font and switch to using it on every single device and application.
Just only use this in output where you also control the rendering, the font can be included in a PDF or with a website. This is for when you publish, not for emails as I understand it.
Re: Amdash – Human only punctuation mark
#26That site is really hard to read. I was about to say it needed a designer, but it obviously had one. But the designer is either very bad or intentionally made the design very bad. I can't tell. I also can't tell if the author is serious or being satirical.
And that flashing image at the bottom could be dangerous for people with seizure disorders.
Re: Amdash – Human only punctuation mark
#27It’s a rough time for those of us who have always used en- and em-dashes and who structure documents with bullet points. I’m fortunate that writing comes easily and quickly, but these days probably most people who read my docs assume it’s AI. I can’t bring myself to abandon my beloved em-dashes though.
The other day I wrote a long (a couple paragraphs) iMessage to 2 friends. I used bullet points ("-") in it and it was detailed. After I sent it I got the response "Did AI write this?" to which I was rather annoyed. Not only that a friend of mine would think I would send them AI Slop is a private group message but also that somewhat implies "I don't think you wrote this".
Now I know they were partly joking and they are the type of person that might not see sending AI-generated response as rude/distasteful (like I do) but it did make me sad for the state of the world. I'm sure many people just slap AI slop into all sorts of conversations with people they call "friends", I don't get it. I use AI for things I don't want to do, talking to my friends is not one of those things.
Re: Amdash – Human only punctuation mark
#28It's a font that morphes the text fragment "am-" into the curly dash using a ligature. https://chriscoyier.net/2025/05/10/the-am-dash/ But that won't help for long. If the Amdash becomes popular, then AI will pick it up, because "am-" is just a text fragment and AI can learn to produce it. Even worse if a future version of Unicode adopts the Amdash, then nothing will stop AI. Or the opposite happens as one already sa…
Yes, there's an obvious negative feedback loop to the effectiveness of this. The designer can't have realised that all symbols are just as opaque as any others to an LLM.
Re: Amdash – Human only punctuation mark
#29It's a font that morphes the text fragment "am-" into the curly dash using a ligature. https://chriscoyier.net/2025/05/10/the-am-dash/ But that won't help for long. If the Amdash becomes popular, then AI will pick it up, because "am-" is just a text fragment and AI can learn to produce it. Even worse if a future version of Unicode adopts the Amdash, then nothing will stop AI. Or the opposite happens as one already sa…
According to Unicode's tenets, if it was used to any great degree then they are obligated to support it, are they not? Their mission is to make it possible to encode any writing glyph humans have ever used to communicate in writing or so I thought.
Re: Amdash – Human only punctuation mark
#30The styling of this reminds me of faces that cant and/or serif the hyphen. I checked a few, and in my very limited survey (Blado, Poliphilus, Trajanus and "related" faces for each that Monotype recommends) most type faces that style the hyphen do not change the appearance of the emdash at all from a horizontal line. The few counter-examples I found are italic faces (Balladeer by URW.)