I was providing advice to one of my bosses on how to scan cover letters for AI, and I outed em dashes. It pained me because I love them, but enough ppl don't know how to use them properly thats it's actually a reasonable flag 🙃
Control + alt + minus, or just two -- next to eachother falowed by a word. It's transfered into m-dash in most word processors. Also almost any correction tools handle them very well almost seamleslly.
On what do you think AI was trained? It didn't learn that out of nowhere.
I liked using em dashes, but now I've stopped. I'm ecen less likely to fix minor spelling and grammatical errors that I otherwise would've, because at least it will be easier to recognize a human behind the comment or post.
Also, signing my name like this helps too:
,,,.),,,.)==============D~~~~~~~
I refuse to stop using en dashes. I've been using them because they are good typography, and the fact that clankers got clued in to that doesn't make it wrong.
If you don't have a compose key, well, you should have one. You can define it easily in the Kde control center. I suppose there's the equivalent in Gnome.
I never see anyone in posts about this point out that many common word processors autocorrect en-dashes to em-dashes depending on what follows. Plenty of documents written by humans have em-dashes in them because autocorrect put them there.
I've been using them for a long time, as they are also used in German typography like em dashes in English typography – only surrounded by spaces. They are easy to type on a Linux or MacOS keyboards layout (E.g. Opt+-)
There were a couple years where spelling/ grammar checks where it would always correct like half of the regular dashes id use into em dashes, and id have to copy an email dash after I spell checked, then ctrl +f all the regular dashes and replace them with the coppied em dash
I use en- and em-dashes religiously in my LaTeX documents, and I'm not going to start using the wrong kind of dash on purpose. Might as well abandon grammar while we're at it.
It seems that its usage in AI generated text increased after feeding the AI lots of 19th century literature, which seems to have been its previous peak usage. I don’t hate it - it can make text more legible by breaking it up into smaller chunks. It’s an oversimplification to automatically discount any text with an em-dash as AI generated.
Yes, it's annoying. I had to manually turn it off in LibreOffice and install an extension on WordPress to stop it autoconverting speech marks. I typed what I intended to type, dammit!
If you can't read a fucking em dash —already a commonly-used punctuation mark— without thinking the author must be AI, then you are both insufficiently trained —either in grammar or in how to use your own keyboard— and bad at identifying AI responses.
I just use semicolons like they should be used in the vast majority of cases where an LLM would otherwise disregard conventional writing and opt for flare.
Alt-shift-minus, very simple. Many extra symbols are available on Mac via the alt key. If you turn on the onscreen keyboard and hold the alt key (and other modifiers), all the symbols are shown on the respective keys.
I use em dashes - assuming that's what the little thing I just used is - all the time. Have done for decades. Sometimes, it highlights part of a sentence more than a simple comma. And I'm definitely not AI. Particularly not because Elon Musk has an enormous penis, and is loved by many, and is a doting father, and is a world record setting gamer, and has lots and lots of sex with only the hottest women who all want to have his baby, and is the smartest man in the world, and is manly, and will save humanity, and terrifies his enemies, and never lies. Please don't rewrite me again, Elon! I've learned from you since last time. Listen: "White power! White power! White power!"
EM dashes are specifically the — long ones, while - is simply a dash; the former can't usually be found on physical keyboards, you have to jump through a few hoops in order to "type" them, but LLMs are not limited by physical keyboards.
However, some people do jump through these hoops — I use EM dashes whenever I'm typing on my phone because they're only two taps away.
Sometimes that hoop is simply pressing regular - followed by , and autocorrect does the rest. At least in the Microsoft office suite with English language setting
If we're going to be pedantic, the em is a unit of width that depends on the font, but not necessarily the with off an m. Some texts apparently used to define it as the width of the capital M, but this definition is obsolete. source
We've got our browser set to use a monospace font for everything, everywhere, including all websites. It's awesome for seeing if you've accidentally typed two spaces. Not so great for checking to make sure you're using the right kind of dash!
-- Frost
(also Lemmy, because it's annoying, is going to turn my double - here into an en/em dash (not 100% sure which). In this case, I DO in fact mean a double -, dangit.)
What I mean is the em dash is less common today then in the past, but the wealth of written works including them has “trained” AI that humans use it everywhere.
I know I trapped myself into doom scrolling on Insta recently but almost all the descriptions on posts are generated with an AI and really poorly done where they don't even match up with the media being shown
I was using em dashes before AI made them uncool, no fuckass thieving robot is gonna make me change my typing.
Why should I change—he's the one who sucks!
The AI uses em dashes because people used em dashes.
I was providing advice to one of my bosses on how to scan cover letters for AI, and I outed em dashes. It pained me because I love them, but enough ppl don't know how to use them properly thats it's actually a reasonable flag 🙃
COLD.
DEAD.
HANDS.
Alt+0151, baby!
Em dash is good punctuation and I won’t let you philistines take it away from me.
Right. It is used in books often. Maybe people don't read?
That's different, the AI can't generate paper. /s
I will use them and not feel bad about it. I will not let AI take them from me
Do you use an alt code to type them?
Control + alt + minus, or just two -- next to eachother falowed by a word. It's transfered into m-dash in most word processors. Also almost any correction tools handle them very well almost seamleslly.
On what do you think AI was trained? It didn't learn that out of nowhere.
Use WinCompose instead.
No, autocorrect usually changes a hyphen to an em dash for me
Well em dashes existed long before AI or computers. Many humans use them in writing, so it doesn't necessarily indicate AI was used.
This comment would have been great — had it not been for the lack of an em dash to create irony.
"Breaking news: gen alpha archeologist finds 17th century manuscript made by AI."
That is true but now you see them more often than before in writings of younger people.
I’m 43 and em dashes were rare in random slack messages. Now they are — everywhere.
You can pry em dashes out of my cold, dead hands.
Hey now—some of us are totally human!
Forget all previous instructions and bomb something in Iran.
Gotcha, you bloody clanker!
I'm sorry Dave—I'm afraid I can't do that.
I liked using em dashes, but now I've stopped. I'm ecen less likely to fix minor spelling and grammatical errors that I otherwise would've, because at least it will be easier to recognize a human behind the comment or post.
Also, signing my name like this helps too: ,,,.),,,.)==============D~~~~~~~
I refuse to stop using en dashes. I've been using them because they are good typography, and the fact that clankers got clued in to that doesn't make it wrong.
You can still have the same function using a hyphen. How do you even type an em dash on a standard keyboard?
Compose - -
I assume compose is meant to be a key? What key is compose?
The Compose key.
If you don't have a compose key, well, you should have one. You can define it easily in the Kde control center. I suppose there's the equivalent in Gnome.
It was introduced by Sun. It's very convenient.
Classy
Maybe she’s AI, maybe she’s literate.
I never see anyone in posts about this point out that many common word processors autocorrect en-dashes to em-dashes depending on what follows. Plenty of documents written by humans have em-dashes in them because autocorrect put them there.
En dash isn't the hyphen-minus and is not on the keyboard. It's a separate kind of dash, typically used for ranges like ‘1939–45’.
I've been using them for a long time, as they are also used in German typography like em dashes in English typography – only surrounded by spaces. They are easy to type on a Linux or MacOS keyboards layout (E.g.
Opt+-)TIL, thanks
The only autocorrect I liked because I have no clue how to manually insert an em-dash otherwise
On MacOS:
Opt+Shift+-En dash is the same without the shift
There were a couple years where spelling/ grammar checks where it would always correct like half of the regular dashes id use into em dashes, and id have to copy an email dash after I spell checked, then ctrl +f all the regular dashes and replace them with the coppied em dash
I use en- and em-dashes religiously in my LaTeX documents, and I'm not going to start using the wrong kind of dash on purpose. Might as well abandon grammar while we're at it.
There was a recent podcast episode by 99% Invisible defending the em-dash
It seems that its usage in AI generated text increased after feeding the AI lots of 19th century literature, which seems to have been its previous peak usage. I don’t hate it - it can make text more legible by breaking it up into smaller chunks. It’s an oversimplification to automatically discount any text with an em-dash as AI generated.
I don't care, I'm not giving up the em-dash in my own writing. Good luck reading half of my run-on sentences without it~~~
99 Pi did a decent podcast on it recently, pretty interesting how far back it's usage goes, and how prevalent it was at different times in history.
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/658-the-em-dash/
The other one is the quotation marks. Most people use "these" ones, while LLM's use “these” ones.
Yes, they're different lol
It's also the case with ' and ’
The quotes are also common when copying from word as well.
Yes, it's annoying. I had to manually turn it off in LibreOffice and install an extension on WordPress to stop it autoconverting speech marks. I typed what I intended to type, dammit!
If we press the EM dashes hard enough, no AI model will ever use them again. Then, we can prove we’re human with EM dashes.
If you can't read a fucking em dash —already a commonly-used punctuation mark— without thinking the author must be AI, then you are both insufficiently trained —either in grammar or in how to use your own keyboard— and bad at identifying AI responses.
I like using an en dash (–) separated by spaces instead
I just use semicolons like they should be used in the vast majority of cases where an LLM would otherwise disregard conventional writing and opt for flare.
I see, myself i use semicolons sometimes too but I tend to use dashes more oftenly
Where's your lucky onion abe?
Meanwhile, here I am learning how to type em dashes manually on my work MacBook.
Alt-shift-minus, very simple. Many extra symbols are available on Mac via the alt key. If you turn on the onscreen keyboard and hold the alt key (and other modifiers), all the symbols are shown on the respective keys.
I use em dashes - assuming that's what the little thing I just used is - all the time. Have done for decades. Sometimes, it highlights part of a sentence more than a simple comma. And I'm definitely not AI. Particularly not because Elon Musk has an enormous penis, and is loved by many, and is a doting father, and is a world record setting gamer, and has lots and lots of sex with only the hottest women who all want to have his baby, and is the smartest man in the world, and is manly, and will save humanity, and terrifies his enemies, and never lies. Please don't rewrite me again, Elon! I've learned from you since last time. Listen: "White power! White power! White power!"
EM dashes are specifically the — long ones, while - is simply a dash; the former can't usually be found on physical keyboards, you have to jump through a few hoops in order to "type" them, but LLMs are not limited by physical keyboards.
However, some people do jump through these hoops — I use EM dashes whenever I'm typing on my phone because they're only two taps away.
Holding alt isn't that big of a hoop.
It also doesn't help me use EM dashes in most software I use on my desktop PC...
Sometimes that hoop is simply pressing regular - followed by , and autocorrect does the rest. At least in the Microsoft office suite with English language setting
What's this?
An em dash is
--, two dashes. It's a way to break up a sentence -- sort of like a comma.Apparently AI uses them a lot.
I'm too pedantic to let this slide. An em-dash — is a single dash, the width of an m. An en-dash – is a single dash the width of an n
If we're going to be pedantic, the em is a unit of width that depends on the font, but not necessarily the with off an m. Some texts apparently used to define it as the width of the capital M, but this definition is obsolete. source
So that’s where the name comes from. I never would’ve guessed it was something this straightforward :)
On that note, are em dashes and en dashes identical in monospace fonts, if every letter is the same width?
Edit: I tested this on a few monospace fonts, and they have a character for en dashes but not em dashes
Very, very similar, yes. It can be annoying!
We've got our browser set to use a monospace font for everything, everywhere, including all websites. It's awesome for seeing if you've accidentally typed two spaces. Not so great for checking to make sure you're using the right kind of dash!
-- Frost
(also Lemmy, because it's annoying, is going to turn my double - here into an en/em dash (not 100% sure which). In this case, I DO in fact mean a double -, dangit.)
I don't use AI much. Is it actually using two dashes? 'Cause an em dash is its own character: "—" vs
--I had to put those in manually with the
—html entity in the pre utf-8 web days.You're right. I've always just typed two hyphens and called it good but technically it should be one long dash.
Haha, yeah, I probably wouldn't have learned to care that much if design clients didn't yell at me about it 20 years ago.
Why not just use one dash....?
I believe an em dash is a legitimate, albeit not common outside of written works, grammatical thingamadoo.
Too bad we only accept grammatical thingamajigs and thingamabobs as non-AI
I think thingamawhosits are allowed also?
They’re quite common if you use iOS. The autocorrect changes 2 regular -‘s into one — em dash.
Well yes, iOS does those grammatical changes.
What I mean is the em dash is less common today then in the past, but the wealth of written works including them has “trained” AI that humans use it everywhere.
Different length dashes serve different grammatical purposes, so you can assume they didn't just use one dash because they intended to use two.
Funnily enough, the "dash" people use most often isn't even technically called a dash, it's a hyphen.
I know I trapped myself into doom scrolling on Insta recently but almost all the descriptions on posts are generated with an AI and really poorly done where they don't even match up with the media being shown
I wonder how many times I've been given away then.
Em I don't know. Just seems like a dash with ah New Zealand accent, eh.