LLM fatigue is real. It's not just em-dash — it's the overall tone of the writing that clues people in. But if your viewpoints and approach are unique, your typesetting won't raise suspicion of machine-generation, except in the most dull of readers. Just be you and it will be fine.

If you'd like more tips on writing I'd be happy to help.

Just do it anyway—I always have, and always will.

Well, I haven't always—just for maybe 20 years.

I switched to semicolons... They look similar enough in use to string things together. I'm sure AI is coming for those too though, and that will be a grim day because those are my last stand.

People will accuse of all types of stuff, regardless if you use em-dashes or not. The way I write apparently is familiar to some as LLM-jargon they've told me, I'm guessing because I've spewed my views and writings on the internet for decades, the LLMs were trained on the way I write, so actually the LLMs are copying me! And others like me.

But anyways, you can't really control how people see your stuff, if you're human I think the humanness will come through anyways, even if you have some particular structure or happen to use em-dashes sometimes. They're so easy to prompt around anyways, that the real tricky LLM stuff to detect by sense and reading is the stuff where the prompter been trying to sneakily make them more human.

My thoughts exactly. As somebody who has always loved to use em-dashes and bulleted lists to organize my thoughts, this is heartbreaking.

It's like being named Michael Bolton and watching a singer rise in fame named Michael Bolton.

Why should I change my style?

I read a text from the 60s by my grandfather this week and seeing an emdash made the LLM alarm in my head go off... Had to really stop myself before I went all "and you" on him

I feel the same way. I've used em-dashes in my writing forever, and I was always particular about making sure they were used properly (from a typography standpoint with no surrounding spaces).

But now, I have to be so picky about when I use them, even when I think it's the perfect punctuation mark. I'll often just resort to a single hyphen with spaces around. It's wrong, but it doesn't signal someone to go "AI AI AI!!"

Funnily enough I've actually started using them a little — it made me realise how much more legible/likable I find them.

(Until a few years ago I probably mostly only saw them in print, and I suppose it just never occurred to me that I liked them in particular vs. just the whole book being professionally typeset generally.)

I totally agree. When I use em-dashes in my /family iMessage thread/ I get accused of having used ChatGPT to write my reply—my one-sentence reply about dinner plans. Dear Lord.

LLM adopting conventions (typographical or otherwise) is what they do, right? The idea that anyone should then have to change their behaviour is ridiculous, as is the whole conversation, really.

I've sometimes taken to using spaced en dashes, which I haven't seen in many AI comments: https://anemato.de/blog/emdash

the destruction of the em-dash is really a shame; and "--" is under suspicion..

It’s not even the key combo, iOS and autocorrect will do it for you.

are there really places that a comma, super-comma; or (parenthesis) dont work roughly as well? I find the em-dash mildly abhorrent, even before this all.

> I'm still salty that I can't use em-dashes anymore for fear of my writing being flagged as AI generated.

I've typeset books (back in the QuarkXPress days, before Adobe's InDesign ruled the typesetting world) and never bothered with em-dashes. Writing online is, to me, a subset of ASCII. YMMW.

But the one thing I don't understand is this: how comes people using LLM outputs are so fucking dumb as to not be able to pass it through a filter (which could even be another LLM prompt) that just says: "remove em-dashes, don't use emojis, don't look like a dumb fuck".

Why oh why are those lazy assholes who ruin our world so dumb that they can't even fix that?

It's facepalming.

You're absolutely right. Not being able to communicate in your own unique style is not just sad, it is incredibly frustrating.

Em-dashes are a bit too conversational for formal prose, so they have always been looked down on aside from usage by AI.