> I've been using it for decades now but these days, I almost always pause for a second.

Wrote about this before [0] but my 2c: you shouldn't pause and you should keep using them because fuck these companies and their AI tools. We should not give them the power to dictate how we write.

[0]: https://manuelmoreale.com/thoughts/on-em-dashes

We're in the brief window of time when AI's writing style is the weirdness. It's an artifact of the production process, like JPG blur, MP3 distortion, autotune's rigidity. And it didn't take long for those things to become normalized, in fact for them to become artifacts that people proudly adopted and embraced. DJs release tracks built from MP3s samples instead of waves. Autotune is famously a 'sound' that was once something to be subtly added and never confessed to, but which now genres and artists lean into rather than away from.

Long story short: I think emoji in headings and lists, em dashes, and the vile TED Talk paragraph structure of "long sentence with lots of words asking a question or introducing a possibility. followed by. short sentences. rebutting. or affirming." are here to stay. My money is that it gets normalized and embraced as "well of course that's how you best communicate because I see it everywhere."

For what it's worth, whatever LLMs do extensively, they do because it's a convention in well-established writing styles.

LLMs have a bias towards expertise and confidence due to the proportion of books in their training set. They also lean towards an academic writing style for the same reason.

All this to say, if LLMs write like you were already writing, it means you have very good foundations. It's fine to avoid them out of fear, but you have this Internet stranger's permission to use your em dash pause to think "Oh yeah, I'm the reference for writing style."

Exactly this! I love(d) using em dashes. Now they’ve become ehm dashes, experiencing exactly that pause — that moment of hesitation — that you describe

I used to enjoy the literate usage of the word "literally".

You'll get over it.

I've gone back to using two dashes--LLMs typically don't write them that way.

The correct thing to do is to use an en-dash with spaces. ;)

Also, unfortunately I have in my global instructions to never use em dashes...

What I do – and I know this isn't conventional style – is use ex dashes. (Or, you could use spaces between em dashes, as incorrect as it is.)

To quote Office Space, “Why should I change? He’s the one who sucks.”

I use it to trigger false positives in haters – why not?

You can still use them — it’s just that they have a new purpose; getting things ignored by AI detection or AI;DR.

Now you can ask for outlandish things at work knowing your boss won’t read it and his summariser will ignore it as slop — win.

You’re absolutely right. I hate AI writing — it’s not that I hate AI, it’s that it makes everything it says sound a specific combination of smug and authoritative — No matter the content. Once you realize it’s not saying anything, that’s the real aha moment.

\s

This is the modern day "I can tell that's photoshopped because I've seen some 'shops in my day." The sooner we stop glorifying the people who think they're magical LLM detectors, the better, frankly.