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Not only am I losing my livelihood to AI – now it's stealing my em dashes too

theguardian.com

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Re: Not only am I losing my livelihood to AI – now it's stealing my em dashes too

#51

Post by Freak_NL »

xxs wrote: post #34
miltonlost wrote: post #22

Ok... that title should have a comma, not an em dash. If you're going to complain about having them being removed, you have to use them properly at least. And then " It seems I have two choices now—keep using em dashes with a sort of stubborn, curmudgeonly pride until all my clients stop exchanging money for words, or start writing incredibly long run-on sentences, like this, with commas all over the place … and mayb…

I like ellipses, they are best to convey my train of thought.

Although overuse of ellipses leads to text which generates the impression that the writer is constantly sighing. I find that exasperating and tiring to read.

Re: Not only am I losing my livelihood to AI – now it's stealing my em dashes too

#52

Post by miltonlost »

xxs wrote: post #34
miltonlost wrote: post #22

Ok... that title should have a comma, not an em dash. If you're going to complain about having them being removed, you have to use them properly at least. And then " It seems I have two choices now—keep using em dashes with a sort of stubborn, curmudgeonly pride until all my clients stop exchanging money for words, or start writing incredibly long run-on sentences, like this, with commas all over the place … and mayb…

I like ellipses, they are best to convey my train of thought.

For me it's (often (nested)) parentheses.

Re: Not only am I losing my livelihood to AI – now it's stealing my em dashes too

#53

Post by rtkwe »

ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote: post #9

I don't get the "em dash = AI" thing. MS Word and iOS have been autocorrecting em dashes for years now. Right? Am I the crazy one?

It would do it but you had to explicitly type a double dash -- iirc without spaces between the preceding and following word for Word to create an em-dash instead of an en-dash; ie this--is an em dash and this -- is and en dash. (at least in my work's version of Word, which should be pretty default, I haven't touched it at least).

Also LLMs use them a lot more than most people so randomly seeing them pop up in tweets and forum posts was taken as a pretty clear sign the text wasn't legitimate. It's also weirdly deeply embedded in the models and you cannot simply prompt it out of existence. [0] A lot of it is about context too. If I see it on a blog post it feels less out of place than on Reddit or bluesky.

[0] https://medium.com/@brentcsutoras/the-em-dash-dilemma-how-a-...

Re: Not only am I losing my livelihood to AI – now it's stealing my em dashes too

#54

Post by beej71 »

cs702 wrote: post #2

Yeah, lately I've found myself editing out my em-dashes , because otherwise people may think it's an LLM writing, not me. Sigh.

Fuck that. I'm using the correct punctuation every time. Anyone using em dashes as anything other than the lowest possible AI signal is just robbing themselves. And if they do it en masse, spammers will just put a dirt simple filter on their AI output and fool them all again.

Re: Not only am I losing my livelihood to AI – now it's stealing my em dashes too

#57

Post by srcreigh »

kbrkbr wrote: post #19
srcreigh wrote: post #14

This is silly. AI generated pieces will have em dashes edited out too. My protest is to use em dashes more. Why not? They’re great. Who cares if AI also uses them.

And where are they?

There's one in this reddit comment, explaining about my pxe server project! https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1nqer0c/i_made_...

There's more, but, sadly, they were written as just -.

Re: Not only am I losing my livelihood to AI – now it's stealing my em dashes too

#58

Post by [deleted] »

echelon wrote: post #21

> Em dashes—often used to connect explanatory phrases, and so named because they’re the width of your average lowercase ‘m’ I did not know that. I just memorized en dash was shorter in length than em dash. If it also corresponds to an "n" length, I'll be delighted.

[deleted]

Re: Not only am I losing my livelihood to AI – now it's stealing my em dashes too

#59

Post by number6 »

Freak_NL wrote: post #3
cs702 wrote: post #2

Yeah, lately I've found myself editing out my em-dashes , because otherwise people may think it's an LLM writing, not me. Sigh.

In Dutch I have the luxury of being able to use the semi-colon in a similar capacity — useful to avoid the em-dash stigma I suppose — but I refuse to relinquish it in English. Fortunately, I can always just point to evidence of prior use here: https://www.gally.net/miscellaneous/hn-em-dash-user-leaderbo...

It is time for an emdash manifesto

Re: Not only am I losing my livelihood to AI – now it's stealing my em dashes too

#60

Post by dragonwriter »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #11
cs702 wrote: post #2

Yeah, lately I've found myself editing out my em-dashes , because otherwise people may think it's an LLM writing, not me. Sigh.

Nah, go the opposite direction — post with em dashes. Let them think you're AI, till they realize people are posting it to spite the "its AI bro" remarks.

Post with em-dashes, sure—just don’t set them open when setting off parentheticals. If – for that em-dash use – you want to set dashes open, use en-dashes instead.
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