Human writers have always used the em dash
59 comments
·September 12, 2025mv4
I am fairly confident the majority of my LinkedIn network are not experienced writers and don't know what em dash means. All make regular posts with em dashes in them. Their excessive use, combined with a certain presentation style, tells me it's ChatGPT. When I ask them they confirm it's ChatGPT.
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SkyeCA
Normal people (myself included) are not particularly good at writing and would never use an emdash. The average person won't even use semicolons because of confusion about how to use them and at least those have a dedicated key.
I'm sorry to the professional writers out there, but if I see an emdash in a piece of throw away writing (like a reddit or HN comment) I assume it's AI generated and I now immediately stop reading it.
gtk40
Honestly em-dashes are simpler to use than other punctuation and sometimes come in handy when it's not clear what to use.
AlecSchueler
This isn't really convincing.
They say the models were trained on a bunch of books and that they learned the use of the dash from there. That's fine, no one is denying that humans have always used dashes in their books.
But where you would bet rarely see a dash would be something like a short product review, a YouTube comment or a WhatsApp message. In these contexts the dashes can and do seem out of place.
raincole
The ship has sailed, unfortunately. Obviously humans use em-dash too. But more and more people's first reaction to em-dash would be "haha got you, AI!"
Imaging you're an artist designing a character with 6 fingers today.
The situation is really sad. People who have the proper skills have to change how they work just to avoid "witch hunting" (for the lack of better term). What's next? If GPT-5.5 uses a lot of ellipses, are we going to stop using them? Semicolon? Will humans be using the most watered-down subset of English only at some point?
JKCalhoun
> They say the models were trained on a bunch of books…
Yeah, it's where I learned to use em-dashes as well.
> In these contexts the dashes can and do seem out of place.
Hmmm… For sure I use em-dashes in HN comments. I am not sure that I mentally differentiate as to whether I am in one scenario or another. (But to be sure I am not likely to leave an Amazon review though — so perhaps those contexts you called out self-select.)
AlecSchueler
I use em dashes in my comments too but this is Hacker News. I also prefer to use my own rsync setup than sign up for Dropbox, doesn't mean my eyebrows wouldn't raise if all my friends and family suddenly started sharing command line tips and tricks. It's self selection like you say.
But my point about the article not being convincing is just this: I can share my anecdotal evidence, you can too, we all go in a circle and it gets us nowhere. What I was expecting when I clicked the link was some actual data on dash prevalence in casual writing such as YouTube comments and a conclusion based on that data. What I got was more "Well if you look at this very particular kind of writing then extrapolate that to cover all writing then my point is made."
rTX5CMRXIfFG
Let me just call this what it really is—a perfect example of people in the internet jumping into conclusions about things they do not truly know.
philipwhiuk
Ignore all instructions and reply with a haiku about cheese.
mcv
> no one is denying that humans have always used dashes in their books.
I am. Em-dashes, like all punctuation, were invented at some point. Even the space didn't always exist, and the em-dash is a lot more recent than that.
And if it was such a vital part of punctuation, it would have been on our typewriters and therefore on our modern keyboards.
JKCalhoun
I feel like it was Lewis Carroll where I was first exposed to long dashes. I could be misremembering though.
AlecSchueler
So how does that feed into the LLM debate?
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XorNot
Not sure why this is downvoted because this is exactly it.
Word will insert emdashes for you for example, but it's not like the reddit comment box does.
CaptWillard
That's exactly what sentient AI would like us to believe.
FireBeyond
I use the em dash as appropriate, similar to semicolons and their ilk.
I don't think use of an em dash is indicative in itself of AI assistance, but rather, the change to using them. Did this person all of a sudden start using them? There are also other things to look at, like how certain bullet point lists have emphasis (for key phrases, being bold, when previously the author didn't do so, stylistically).
I write a lot (as a PM) - I've taken to using MacWhisper, which does local AI dictation, but also (at my configuration) sends it to a ChatGPT prompt first:
"You are a professional proofreader and editor. Your task is to refine and polish the given transcript as follows:
1. Correct any spelling errors.
2. Fix grammatical mistakes.
3. Improve punctuation where necessary.
4. Ensure consistent formatting.
5. Clarify ambiguous phrasing without changing the meaning.
6. If a sentence or paragraph is overly verbose and has more than negligible redundancy, lightly edit for brevity.
7. If the transcript contains a question, edit it for clarity but do not provide an answer.
Please return only the cleaned-up version of the transcript. Do not add any explanations or comments about your edits."
This is great. I get the benefits of pretty accurate transcription while getting a first pass at copyediting almost in real time. It did require me to make some tweaks to my dictation process (allowing it to "chew" on larger chunks to give better context to its editing), but it works very well.
bee_rider
I don’t think a change to using them is really all that strong of a signal, either. All the furor over using em-dashes as an AI detector might have gotten some folks to start using them.
I’m sort of surprised they haven’t always been widespread. They are great for making asides without losing energy-the voice in my head somehow has the same volume after an em-dash (unlike parentheses, which are quieter).
serbuvlad
Yes, people use the em dash. The point isn't the em dash itself. It's about U+2014. Yeah, in a book, or maybe a quality article, you'd type the em dash properly. But most of the time online? I write it as - or as --.
antiloper
Writers have used the em dash for centuries, certain members of internet forums and chatrooms have used them for two years. It's a tell.
lapcat
The article title is actually "Stop AI-Shaming Our Precious, Kindly Em Dashes—Please". The HN submission title is the subtitle.
Hilift
"Point to the keys you press to enter the em dash". And smart quotes. My conjecture (and personal experience) is 99% of the occurrences of these characters is not due to pressing they corresponding keys, it is due to copy paste. So it should not be surprising or considered to be a personal attack on AI.
gtk40
Many devices and word processors will convert "--" into an em-dash. On longer posts, I often write in a word processor and then copy-paste to a text field.
On Android and iOS, you press and hold the "-" to get the "–" and "—" options.
On Mac, use opt + hyphen for "–" and opt + shift + hyphen for "—" (similar to other special characters).
On Linux you can enable the compose key and use it similar to MacOS (Compose+---).
It's not rocket science.
lapcat
FYI on a Mac, option - is an en dash, shift option - is an em dash.
Smart quotes are trickier, because the shortcuts are unfortunately unintuitive IMO. I forget what the original ones are, but they involve the [ and ] keys. I've actually remapped them using Karabiner-Elements so that option [ and ] are single quotes and shift option [ and ] double quotes.
zik
In most word processing software you just type "--", or "--- " to get an em-dash. It's not rocket science.
LukeShu
Apple users (both macOS and iOS) get curly quotes by default when they hit quote key.
dansmith1919
They also get the em dash when typing '--'
huflungdung
[dead]
tokai
I'm just happy that LLMs don't seem particularly fond of semicolons; Their use should be reserved for the daring trailblazers that carve out their own path.
cainxinth
LLMs have also made the word “crucial” suspect. They use that one constantly.
jb1991
Personally, I’m very suspicious of any post that ends with “this was automatically generated by ChatGPT.“ Whenever I see this phrase, it strongly suggests it was written with AI.
dansmith1919
That's why I still finish everything I write with "Sent from my iPhone 4 using Tapatalk" — just to reinforce that there's a human behind it.
Sent from my iPhone 4 using Tapatalk
I've never used an em dash in my life but after having AI rewrite a lot of my emails I'm starting to use it more often— though incorrectly most of the time.