If there is one person who likes to hear himself talk too much to use AI, it's got to be Stephen Wolfram.

If you go back to a random much older post you’ll find emdashes aplenty.

e.g. https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2014/07/launching-mathem...

The other day I formatted a sentence out loud in the "it's not just x it's y" structure and immediately felt gross, despite having done it probably a million times in my lifetime. That was an out-of-body feeling.

There are dozens of us that used them before AI! Dozens!

The em-dash metric is silly. Some people (including me) have always used them and plan to continue to do so. I just pulled up some random articles by Wolfram from the before-LLM days and guess what: em-dashes everywhere. One sample from 2018 had 89 of them. Wolfram has always written in the same style (which, admittedly, can be a bit self-aggrandizing and verbose). It’s kinda weird to see people just blowing it off as AI slop just because of a —.

LLMs use the em-dash excessively but correctly. This post is littered with them in places they don't belong which makes it look decidedly human, as if written by someone who believes that random em-dashes make their writing look more professional, while actually having the opposite effect.

If you really want to know: more than one emmy-dash per paragraph is probably excessive.

> LLMs don’t—and can’t—do everything. What they do is very impressive—and useful. It’s broad. And in many ways it’s human-like. But it’s not precise. And in the end it’s not about deep computation.

This is a mess. What is the flow here? Two abrupt interrupts (and useful) followed by stubby sentences. Yucky.

Thank you from saving me a click and my brain from consuming AI slop by a person who cannot be bothered to use their own damn words.