alt Hacker NewsI feel like people only look at the form and ignore the substance of the content. Honestly, as long as the content itself is well written and the em-dash is used correctly, I don't think it really matters.
When I first learned about em-dashes, I was told they were a mark of sophisticated, intellectual writing. But now people say they sound like AI. Is that really a bad thing?
It's strange to see sophistication become low-class just because AI uses it. It makes me think that form is really about who the author is, not the form itself.
In that sense, I'm not sure what it even means to be 'human-like.' Being human-like just feels like an illusion that people who want to believe in it keep insisting on
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I too find it a pity that the em-dash has been co-opted by AI. I use a double-hyphen ("--", the old school way of writing it), but fear that this will also become used by AI seeking a higher form of 'sophistication' as you put it.
We're experiencing broad scale changes in the sentiment of style in written English. I don't know what the best approach to take here is necessarily, but the more I see language evolving over time (especially over the past two decades) I think I'd prefer to shift my habits in line with whatever the "modern standard" is in order to avoid falling into pitfalls, i.e. being accused of being an AI writer.
As of recently, there is a strong correlation between use of em-dashes and a verbose, bloated style of writing that uses many words to not quite get to multiple repeated points. Not well written, in other words.
The combination of both I usually find in text generated for me by LLM, and so far, it serves as a good signal for density of information and, inversely, not-quite-right ideas and their connections. (That's not to say it's pervasive, but below the surface, the quality of LLM text as a medium is often not great.)
There may be well-written text of non-trivial length generated by LLMs, but so far I haven't knowingly encountered any, with or without em-dashes. Human editing remains very necessary.
The problem is that the substancelessness of AI writing nowadays tends to be subtle and well-hidden (but huge). Focusing on superficial "tells" is basically an attempt of a quick, cheap defense against the imbalance of human effort, where someone can spend a few dollars and a few minutes and e.g. generate dozens of PRs that would take many hours of real human effort to process and fix the deeper shortcomings of.
The em-dash-as-AI trope is nothing new. (Apart from the fact that MS Word etc convert them automatically.)
If I post some information, then I have had people accusing me of cribbing it off Wikipedia. When I have translated from some languages, people assume I'm using Google. Even though in one case, the language in question wasn't even available on Google Translate. (I went and checked.)
> people only look at the form and ignore the substance of the content.
This is largely because most people are incapable of thinking critically and evaluating substance. So they regress to indirect markers of good writing, and the whole thing becomes a game of signaling.
The rot is so deep, many popular resources on writing focus more on style and presentation than focusing on the substance of writing. And even when best-intentioned, all this does is make poor writing a bit more palatable by giving it a veneer of polish.