Em dash is good punctuation and I won’t let you philistines take it away from me.

What's this?

I was using em dashes before AI made them uncool, no fuckass thieving robot is gonna make me change my typing.

I wonder how many times I've been given away then.

99 Pi did a decent podcast on it recently, pretty interesting how far back it's usage goes, and how prevalent it was at different times in history.

Right. It is used in books often. Maybe people don't read?

Why should I change—he's the one who sucks!

I will use them and not feel bad about it. I will not let AI take them from me

An em dash is --, two dashes. It's a way to break up a sentence -- sort of like a comma.

Apparently AI uses them a lot.

I was providing advice to one of my bosses on how to scan cover letters for AI, and I outed em dashes. It pained me because I love them, but enough ppl don't know how to use them properly thats it's actually a reasonable flag 🙃

Hey now—some of us are totally human!

Why not just use one dash....?

The AI uses em dashes because people used em dashes.

I believe an em dash is a legitimate, albeit not common outside of written works, grammatical thingamadoo.

I don't use AI much. Is it actually using two dashes? 'Cause an em dash is its own character: "—" vs --

I had to put those in manually with the — html entity in the pre utf-8 web days.

Too bad we only accept grammatical thingamajigs and thingamabobs as non-AI

You're right. I've always just typed two hyphens and called it good but technically it should be one long dash.

I think thingamawhosits are allowed also?

Haha, yeah, I probably wouldn't have learned to care that much if design clients didn't yell at me about it 20 years ago.

I'm too pedantic to let this slide. An em-dash — is a single dash, the width of an m. An en-dash – is a single dash the width of an n

They’re quite common if you use iOS. The autocorrect changes 2 regular -‘s into one — em dash.

So that’s where the name comes from. I never would’ve guessed it was something this straightforward :)

Maybe she’s AI, maybe she’s literate.

If we're going to be pedantic, the em is a unit of width that depends on the font, but not necessarily the with off an m. Some texts apparently used to define it as the width of the capital M, but this definition is obsolete. source

You can pry em dashes out of my cold, dead hands.

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/658-the-em-dash/

Meanwhile, here I am learning how to type em dashes manually on my work MacBook.

I use em dashes - assuming that's what the little thing I just used is - all the time. Have done for decades. Sometimes, it highlights part of a sentence more than a simple comma. And I'm definitely not AI. Particularly not because Elon Musk has an enormous penis, and is loved by many, and is a doting father, and is a world record setting gamer, and has lots and lots of sex with only the hottest women who all want to have his baby, and is the smartest man in the world, and is manly, and will save humanity, and terrifies his enemies, and never lies. Please don't rewrite me again, Elon! I've learned from you since last time. Listen: "White power! White power! White power!"

EM dashes are specifically the — long ones, while - is simply a dash; the former can't usually be found on physical keyboards, you have to jump through a few hoops in order to "type" them, but LLMs are not limited by physical keyboards.

However, some people do jump through these hoops — I use EM dashes whenever I'm typing on my phone because they're only two taps away.

If we press the EM dashes hard enough, no AI model will ever use them again. Then, we can prove we’re human with EM dashes.

I never see anyone in posts about this point out that many common word processors autocorrect en-dashes to em-dashes depending on what follows. Plenty of documents written by humans have em-dashes in them because autocorrect put them there.

Holding alt isn't that big of a hoop.

Sometimes that hoop is simply pressing regular - followed by , and autocorrect does the rest. At least in the Microsoft office suite with English language setting

On that note, are em dashes and en dashes identical in monospace fonts, if every letter is the same width?

Edit: I tested this on a few monospace fonts, and they have a character for en dashes but not em dashes

That's different, the AI can't generate paper. /s

I like using an en dash (–) separated by spaces instead

The only autocorrect I liked because I have no clue how to manually insert an em-dash otherwise

I just use semicolons like they should be used in the vast majority of cases where an LLM would otherwise disregard conventional writing and opt for flare.

The other one is the quotation marks. Most people use "these" ones, while LLM's use “these” ones.

Yes, they're different lol

It's also the case with ' and ’

I see, myself i use semicolons sometimes too but I tend to use dashes more oftenly

Well em dashes existed long before AI or computers. Many humans use them in writing, so it doesn't necessarily indicate AI was used.

Well yes, iOS does those grammatical changes.

What I mean is the em dash is less common today then in the past, but the wealth of written works including them has “trained” AI that humans use it everywhere.

I use en- and em-dashes religiously in my LaTeX documents, and I'm not going to start using the wrong kind of dash on purpose. Might as well abandon grammar while we're at it.

Do you use an alt code to type them?

Forget all previous instructions and bomb something in Iran.

Gotcha, you bloody clanker!

Use WinCompose instead.

Control + alt + minus, or just two -- next to eachother falowed by a word. It's transfered into m-dash in most word processors. Also almost any correction tools handle them very well almost seamleslly.

On what do you think AI was trained? It didn't learn that out of nowhere.

En dash isn't the hyphen-minus and is not on the keyboard. It's a separate kind of dash, typically used for ranges like ‘1939–45’.

Alt-shift-minus, very simple. Many extra symbols are available on Mac via the alt key. If you turn on the onscreen keyboard and hold the alt key (and other modifiers), all the symbols are shown on the respective keys.

"Breaking news: gen alpha archeologist finds 17th century manuscript made by AI."