From the article:
First, generative AI. I haven’t seen any hard evidence that chatbots, in practice, use more em dashes than anyone else.
Ok, look. I don’t have an em dash button on my keyboard. I do have a hyphen button. If I want an em dash in my writing, I have to go and hunt for one, or I use Word, which loooves to swap in those em dashes even when I just want a hyphen. I ain’t gonna pump my text through Word when I’m just hammering out a reply to someone online.
So that’s the big clue here that I think the author is missing. Posts like mine right here - that I’m swiping out on Gboard right now on my phone - they’re not going to have em dashes.
Posts generated by AI bots, who’ve been trained on a corpus chock full of em dashes because of Word and other helpful typesetting software, they’re much more likely to have them, along with bullet points, neat summarising conclusions, and that blandness you only get when you ingest a trillion properly formatted documents to statistically regurgitate later.
On Apple platforms, alt-hyphen is en dash, and alt-shift-hyphen is em dash, and on iOS it’s on the long press of the hyphen button, so the kind of person who likes to use them can do so pretty easily if they’re an Apple user.
I’ve been using the em dash online for decades. If AI is trained off of human-written posts (it is) and it’s trained on sites I’ve posted on (it has), and if em dashes are a telltale sign AI wrote the post (seems that way), then logically speaking, I am partially to blame.
I’m still going to use them, though.
And I’m still going to teach people how to use them.
I’m curious, where are you getting your em dashes from?
My US 101 keyboard layout doesn’t have it, do euro keyboard layouts with alt-gr have it relatively easily accessible? Presumably there’s an alt+numpad combo, but that seems to be something that would interrupt the flow of typing quite a bit.
I’ve just discovered that if I go into the numeric/character section of my phone keyboard and long press the -, I can get —, but that’s a long-winded way of getting them.
On most linux desktops there is a “compose” key. Mine’s set to capslock. So that and then pressing
-twice is all it takes to produce one — which I will continue to do without hesitation. It’s also good for typing things like ēö°«€½ and so on.
I’ve tried replacing them with a double hyphen instead, i.e. ‘–’, since it has the same effect but is less likely to look like I’m a bot. It’s a shame because I used to always write with them and a comma isn’t a perfect substitution.
I just use a comma. Keyboard has it and I don’t care enough about proper english grammar. If people understand what I mean, it fulfilled its purpose.
