To be fed the em dash being conflated with AI?

[MyWarmOchreHare]

I’ve always used it, although usually just in dash format for the sake of ease. It comes as easily as full stops and commas.

Why is everyone just now discovering it? I’ve just completed a job application and went and edited my dashes out in case they followed this trend of thinking it indicates AI.

It’s actually genuinely really annoying me that people who have lived under rocks or who’ve never written anything since school are accusing people who’ve got a reasonable grasp of English of being AI.

Although it makes startlingly normal the, what I thought at the time was very strange, episode where I’d written something for a colleague and he asked ‘what are all those dashes for?’

We went to the same school and he’s only five years younger.

It’s beyond annoying. Lots of us know how to and regularly do use an em dash. It’s more astounding that so many people think it’s unusual.

It’s just that like the semi colon they haven’t been in favour for a long time.

Absolute dead give away with ChatGPT is no spaces around the em dash. If I saw a space I wouldn’t think anything of it. But when it’s all joined up, that’s the giveaway.

sorry missed this, but yes - basically, this!

Regardless it’s not two dashes together.

I’m only 36. It’s not like AI is speaking by saying thee and thy. The dashes are in everyday use.

Why on earth are people using them? You only need a long dash if you're typesetting and don't want your dash to break up a line.

Bonkers. It's not even on a standard keyboard. If PPs are fart-arsing around with key codes just to get a long dash, they must all be ... well, I dunno: pretentious?

Also: as a SPAG pedant of some description, OP, you might want to consider your incorrect use of 'conflated'. Sorry!

It’s a sign of AI use (copilot uses them) when they have no spaces and they seem longer than the standard M dash.

i use hyphens in my normal writing but the AI “clue” was told to me the other day when I had an email that really got my back up. It was smug and superior. I was so cross someone would write like that to me (they also cc’d in a senior director trying to point out to them I was wrong - I wasn’t, I just wasn’t doing what they wanted because I have my own brain and priorities. Senior director is fully aware of my work and will not have received it how the sender was hoping - they will come across as a twat).

Anyway, other colleague who I was ranting to pointed out the obvious use of AI with m-dash and no spaces (makes sense, he’s our AI expert). So yes, it seems AI has become a smug/condescending colleague I have to tolerate.

I love a semi colon!

I very much like semi colons; I’m also a fan of dashes - en, I believe - and also of the ellipsis…

I totally agree. I like an em dash, a hangover from an earlier career in publishing where I learnt to punctuate properly having gone through school failing to do so. (Could have used one nicely in that sentence.) Similarly semi colons. I now feel like I can’t use them because of bloody AI.

I wish people would consider the bollocks AI comes up with instead of its punctuation. I Googled Andy Bell the other day, to discover AI thinks Oasis Andy Bell and Erasure Andy Bell are the same person.

We teach children how to use hyphens and dashes in primary school, but no em dashes in the UK.

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.

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.

*Posted on the wrong thread so deleted.

Sorry.

I know nothing of dashes 😁

They are conflating them though. They are mixing those of us who use them with AI. They are combining, confusing — conflating — the two.

No one is using em (or en) dashes to break up lines. They’re used in place or parenthesis and it’s quite common.

There is a certain irony in trusting AI to recognise AI.

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

Not a lot, it’s just personal preference.

Those are both hyphen.

Nobody has these correct on here!

Em ―–
En ––
Hyphen -

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 😁

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.

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.

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!

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.