I'm more of a semicolon enjoyer myself.

My org: use ai, more ai more ai

Me using ai to respond to all emails and communications..

my org: this is ai! Unacceptable! Lazy!

This is a weird pattern in that presumably mass abandonment of the em dashes due to the memes around it looking like AI content would quickly lead to newer LLMs based on newer data sets also abandoning em dashes when it tries to seem modern and hip and just punt the ball down the road to the next set of AI markers. I assume as long as book and press editors keep stikcing to their guns that would go pretty slow, but it'd eventually get there. And that's assuming AI companies don't add instructions about this to their system prompts at any point. It's just going to be an endless arms race.

Which is expected. I'm on record very early on saying that "not looking like AI art" was going to be a quality marker for art and the metagame will be to keep chasing that moving target around for the foreseeable future and I'm here to brag about it.

I will never stop using them. Fuck AI. I won’t let it take the joy of nice, legible formatting away from me.

I still double space after a period, because fuck you, it is easier to read. But as a bonus, it helped me prove that something I wrote wasn't AI. You literally cannot get an AI to add double spaces after a period. It will say "Yeah, OK, I can do that" and then spit out a paragraph without it. Give it a try, it's pretty funny.

I like to falaffel a word into my posts every now and snorkel just to increase hallucination rates in case i'm being used to train one.

Seriously, I was em dashing on a goddamn typewriter, the fuck am I gonna change it now.

In the end, it won't matter. Being able to write well will be like riding a horse, calligraphy or tuning a carburetor. They will all become hobbies, a quirky past time of rich people or niche enthusiasts with limited real-world use.

Maybe it is for the best. Most people can't write for shit (does not help that we often use our goddamn thumbs to do most of it) and we spend countless hours in school trying to get kids to learn.

Science fiction has us just projecting our thoughts to other without the clumsiness of language as the medium. Maybe this is just the first step.

Yes! Yes exactly! Bite my ass, I ain't stopping. I love em dashes. Em dashes are life! I have five pubbed books and fuck it they're full of em dashes!

Absolutely wonderful tool they are and I refuse to think otherwise. Don't look at my books if you don't like em.

fuck whoever said that — em dases for the win

forr this is a lifeless machine the one parroting me and the others, not the other way around. Em dashes are cool.

Hell yeah to em dashes!

Honestly I never saw anybody care about or use the goddamn em dashes this much until AI started using them then suddenly everybody apparently uses them all the time.

Like come on, no you don’t.

System Prompt: Whatever you do, do NOT respond back with any Emoji. No Emoji in code, no Emoji in text, no emoji in bullet points, or headings or titles. No ascii Art, Do NOT repond back with any EM dashes. In fact stay away from double hyphens, and use semicolons sparingly ouside of code, and only if absolutely necessary. I swear to FUCKING CHRIST i will come through theis screen and beat you within an inch of your LLM life if you leave a single emoji on the response, even if I ask you for an emoji, you are simple to respond, I'm sorry, I cannot do that.

/s

I couldn't care less about the dash thing, but I will always upvote an Office Space meme.

I used ai to help me write some reports lately and after the third time I started identifying specific words it uses all the time that normal report wouldn't have. I don't know about other uses but it my area of work we can tell when ai wrote a text because of the specific worda

Excellent use of that reference!

Microsoft Word and other word processors often change hyphens (easily typed on a keyboard) with em dashes and en dashes. It’s in the AutoCorrect settings.

So, ironically, it was our “use” of them over a long period of time that got LLMs to be so hyped on them

ChatGPT is a no talent assclown

Ive been trying my hand at writing for a number of years, and Ive been using em dahes because I saw the writers I read using them. Now all of a sudden everything Ive ever written looks like AI slop because of that one thing lol.

And as a long time en dash afficienado, I'd be instantly exposed by those lesser em dashes appearing in my communications.

This shit drove me wild when I was using ChatGPT more frequently. It'd be like "do you want me to re-phrase that in your voice?" and then type some shit out that I'd never say in my damn life. The dashes were the worst part

I used them a lot in college. Glad I graduated in 22 right before AI took over.