My old colleague and friend Watts Martin has an interesting and amusing post on em dashes and their indication of AI generated text. As many of you know, Irreal is an em dash friendly site [1, 2, 3, 4] and we spend a good portion of our pixel budget on them.
I was, therefore, surprised to discover from Martin’s post that according to LinkedIn influencers, real people don’t use em dashes—they use hyphens—and therefore em dashes are a sure sign of AI generated text. Once I got over the notion of a “LinkedIn influencer” and what that could possibly mean, I read Martin’s explanation for this bizarre and clearly erroneous belief.
His explanation would make a fine Red Meat Friday post. The TL;DR is that LLM AIs are, by and large, trained on polished text where the use of em dashes is natural and common, whereas, sadly, many people can’t write at all. That is, their reading and writing is restricted to things like emails or business memos that haven’t had the benefit of even a first editing pass, let alone a final polishing. Most of these people don’t read enough “good” writing to even know what it looks like.
Those of us who do use em dashes should feel flattered. We are, apparently, at least as good at writing as the current AIs. Of course, I’d prefer the comparison to be to Iain M Bank’s Minds—this is Irreal, after all.