Upon inspection, the author's personal website used em dashes in 2023. I hope this helped with your witch hunt.
I'm imagining a sort of Logan's Run-like scifi setup where only people with a documented em dash before November 30, 2022, i.e. D(ash)-day, are left with permission to write.
Phew. I have published work with em dashes, bulleted lists, “not just X, but Y” phrasing, and the use of “certainly”, all from the 90’s. Feel sorry for the kids, but I got mine.
> I'm imagining a sort of Logan's Run-like scifi setup where only people with a documented em dash before November 30, 2022, i.e. D(ash)-day, are left with permission to write.
At least Robespierre needed two sentences before condemning a man. Now the mob is lynching people on the basis of a single glyph.
I have been overusing em dashes and bulleted lists since the actual 80s, I'm sad to say. I spent much of the 90s manually typing "smart" quotes.
I have actually been deliberately modifying my long-time writing style and use of punctuation to look less like an LLM. I'm not sure how I feel about this.
Alt + 0151, baby! Or... however you do it on MacOS.
But now, likewise, having to bail on emdashes. My last differentiator is that I always close set the emdash—no spaces on either side, whereas ChatGPT typically opens them (AP Style).
found the guy who didn't know about em dashes before this year
also your question implies a bad assumption even if you disclaim it. if you don't want to imply a bad assumption the way to do that is to not say the words, not disclaim them
didn't even notice the em dashes to be honest, i noticed the contrast framing in the second paragraph and the "It's impressive how" for its conclusion.
as for the "assumption" bit, yeah fair enough. was just curious of AI usage online, this wasn't meant to be a dig at anyone as i know people use it for translations, cleaning up prose etc
No offense taken, but realize that good number of us folks who have learned English as a second language have been taught in this way (especially in an academic setting). LLMs' writing are like that of people, not the other way around.
wouldn't say that... they're very distinctly not like people, that's (part of) the problem. But I don't think the difference is measured exactly in the choices of words and punctuation. It's more like... you can tell, reading AI writing, that it's not "sincere"; no person would want to say what the AI is saying, because it feels fake and disingenuous. The phrases and em dashes and whatever else are just the method for this effect. Real people use the same phrases but with real intent to communicate behind them, and the result is different in a way that is curiously easy to detect.
You know, I didn’t think about that, but you’re right. I have seen so many AI narrations where it reads the dash exactly like a hyphen, actually maybe slightly reducing the inter-word gap. Odd the kinds of “easy” things such as complicated and advanced system gets wrong.
this is totally out of my own self-interest, no problems with its content