Irreal is, of course, an em-dash friendly site. We’ve extolled the mighty em-dash and our love for it many times. Recently, an odious meme has arisen claiming that “real” people don’t use the em-dash and that its use is a sure sign of AI generated text.
I wasn’t even aware of this silliness until my pal Watts Marten wrote about it back in April. Needless to say, we here in the Irreal bunker have nothing but disdain for the people making this claim. Among other things, they reveal their lack of understanding of how LLMs work and are trained as well as their complete unfamiliarity with good writing.
This nonsense has gone so far that ChatGPT is letting users disable it use. What’s happening here is that good writers are being pressured, by what can only be described as the rabble, to stop using useful punctuation or be accused of outsourcing their writing to AI.
Some, like the Irreal Bunker residents, have dealt with this by simply ignoring it. We continue to use em-dashes and if the ignorant choose interpret this as meaning Irreal is actually written by a laptop, that’s their lookout.
Others are less sanguine. They not only refuse to be bullied but are actively fighting back. To wit, over at Beetle Space there’s a manifesto demanding that we take back the em-dash and tell the ignorant to go pound sand. Irreal proudly endorses this proclamation.