To be fed the em dash being conflated with AI?

Sorry that stuff really pisses me off. The utter hypocrisy of saying no AI yet using AI to see if AI has been used is ridiculous…

they aren’t even accurate. I wrote an article for a client - spent 3 hours writing it from scratch. Grammaely told me it was 87% AI generated! fucking bollocks.

what happens is id you write something on a common topic, its more likely to consider it AI because its knowledge of that subject matter is much higher.

I love a good semi-colon!

Em dashes were commonly used in the 19th century. For example, Wuthering Heights, Sense and Sensibility, and Vanity Fair.

I genuinely don’t see how people can write well without a grasp of the semi-colon. Dashes I can take or leave. I don’t encourage my students to use them in formal writing anyway but they are proving a reliable marker of AI use.

Another semi-colon fan here; I'm hoping they don't catch on.
Although AI is unlikely to ramble as much as me. Or use the MN special manic grin

As do I, but am now troubled to discover the existence of dash etiquette and usage.

I have been using a - all unaware of the M-dash, N-dash subtlety.

As others have said, em-dashes are American. We don’t use them in UK English. We use lovely, neat en-dashes.

I’m an editor and just edited a manuscript full of em-dashes. I changed every single one.

I’d assume the AI thing is just that AI is really American? Or does using em-dashes flag as AI in US English too?

Fascinating. I’m a journalist and don’t use AI and only heard about this assumption/theory on here. Could someone post a piece of AI written work so we can see how it uses the dashes?

I’ve started using em-dashes recently just because I saw them around, and thought they looked useful.

I don’t know what the actual rule is, if there is one, but how I use them is as a slightly-less strong version of parathenses, where you wouldn’t want to break out of the voice that the rest of the sentence is written in. Hence the content between the dashes should be a single clause, there shouldn’t be a conjunction or preposition either side of the em-dashes, and the effect should be to continue an urgent train-of-thought so they’re often a brisk qualifier to something already-said and so I suppose I wouldn’t usually even put a verb in there.

In summary: em-dashes are somewhere between commas, which delineate separate clauses, and brackets (which I use where a separate voice intervenes). While to some they appear unusual—an interloper to our sacred tongue—they are nevertheless a welcome addition to our armoury.

I love a semi colon!

My A Level history teacher liked sem colons and thought they were neglected. He was always encouraging us to use them (appropriately, of course).

His teaching methods were a bit dry, but by God he taught you how to write an essay. I've always been grateful to him for that.

An en dash is not a hyphen.

hyphen -
en dash –
em dash —

I mentioned this on another thread yesterday but I'm a civil servant and when I joined 13years ago, we were all taught to use en/em dashes in our written documents and briefings. I find it very strange its now so associated with AI.

I'm published by penguin in the United States and they use an Em Dash without spaces on either side. I would just assume someone was from the US if I saw them using it here. I certainly wouldn't think it was AI.

It annoys me too. I was also reading (a few months ago is think, when the "em dash = AI thing seemed most prevalent) that people with adhd tend to use things like em dashes a lot more due to the tendency to "every thought comes with a bonus thought". So thats nice, that people who already are trying their best to articulate their thoughts might get accused of using AI instead of thinking at all!

Autocorrect does though. You put in a dash... And it will often turn it to an em-dash. I can't be bothered fixing it online.

I wasn’t using dashes in my example - I was explaining them…
let’s see if this copy paste from wiki works
en-dash:
The room – dark and depressing – was at the end of the corridor.

Em-dash style:
The room—dark and depressing—was at the end of the corridor.

As an aside, I ran a paragraph of my work through an AI checker the other day. Apparently, I'm 77% AI... probably won't surprise many of my acquaintances, but still bloody annoying 😁

Those are both hyphen.

Nobody has these correct on here!

Em ―–
En ––
Hyphen -

Indeed, I've never heard of m dashes. What's the difference between those and brackets in a sentence?

*Posted on the wrong thread so deleted.

Sorry.

I know nothing of dashes 😁

Most people are familiar with them and don't automatically think AI - it's just an indicator. It's annoying though- I'm finding myself editing them out of my reports so they don't look like AI.

I work in an industry where AI produced work is explicitly banned, and we are trained to look for markers that may suggest that AI has been used. The presence of em dashes is just one of many indicators that a piece of work might be AI assisted, along with a load of other things. We look at a range of factors and if a lot of them are present, the material is run through an AI detector to check. Em dashes on their own are not, as you say, proof that work is AI assisted, but because AI generated content uses them much more often than the human users of our products, it is one of the things we look out for.

We had nearly 40 applicants recently for a job that clearly stated that AI was not acceptable, and ran all the personal statements through the AI detector. Nearly three quarters were partly or wholly AI generated.