I don't know if the person you replied to implied it was a bad thing, but it's been a thing for centuries, Caravaggio self inserted himself and people from the street in his paintings, van Eyck hid himself in his paintings, Louis David painted himself among the Coronation of Napoleon, etc

Smartphone cameras are almost certainly the largest source of photography in society today, and those things default to doing all kinds of automatic processing on the images they take.

Just use them regardless. A lot of sloppers realized they can ask the slop making machines to leave them out. I even seen stuff when they added random typos to fool some people.

"—cheeks."

People who read books are a different breed. I wouldn't worry about them.

But if we're going to make a lazy heuristical stand against AI, I've always enjoyed the liberal use of semi-colons.

Did you memorize the alt code to make one?

If you use the compose key, you don't have to memorize the unicode value. You just press compose ---.

So if a poster uses an em dash out of that context, it right away throws up a red flag cuz... howd you do that easily?

Did you memorize the alt code to make one?

On KDE, the default keyboard layout makes it pretty easy to type the various dashes and quotation marks, so that's one way. Ever since discovering that, I've been making a conscious effort to use them (because I am the type of person who likes doing the typograhically correct thing, even in an informal context… maybe that's the problem, actually). Haven't been called out as “AI” yet, but it's probably going to happen at some point.

i gotta be honest, before it became a big talking point with AI, i didn't realize em dashes, en dashes, and dashes were different characters, just different grammatical functions of the same character. i figured fancy word processors made them longer to make them distinct from minus signs, but that was it!

On a Mac it’s shift + option + dash. Just option + dash for an en dash.

It's one click away on my android keyboard.

It depends on the keyboard, and the software. I'm using HeliBoard on my phone right now, and all I have to do to make an em dash is hold the dash key—that's it. It's actually quite trivial to add em dashes in various cases, and I wish folks wouldn't pretend otherwise.

I also make use of other characters, like my beloved interrobang. I actually have that pinned to my clipboard, so I can paste it when it's appropriate.

"You care about writing enough to use special characters‽"

"Yes."

As someone who uses a phone — you just hold a minus until it allows you to input dashes. Also, when I used windows I had it memorized, on Linux it doesn't always work, but should be Ctrl+U 2014, on Mac it's just minus with modifier buttons pressed

It's not hard to input that if you want to

But if you're writing something significant, you're probably using a text editor, and many of them will automatically replace the en dash when the em dash when the are spaces on either side.

Did you memorize the alt code to make one?

Fun fact: on some keyboard layouts you can access the em dash easly

This is the most common Italian layout

You can see that you just need to press control+hyphen

Mac has always been opt+shift+hyphen

Honestly for old versions of windows yes, you had to learn the arcane alt+0151, but I was already used to that for typing in french on a British keyboard. It's now more like Mac with win+shift+hyphen

Android and IPhone, you just hold on the hyphen to get to them

And many word processors (and Linux via compose) turn a triple hyphen into one

I use a the Compose key (Compose hyphen hyphen hyphen) or emacs (C-x 8 _ m) on Linux, and on Android, my soft keyboard supports holding hyphen to insert one.

And the Lemmy Web UI converts a triple hyphen to an em-dash.

Dunning-kruger in action.

Not only that but also long explanations.

The infuriating thing is, this complaint isn't even new. People just have a trendy and new justification to latch onto, but it's the same as it ever was. Many, possibly even most, of the people going so far as to take time out of their day to screech "TL;DR!" at you are really just admitting that their attention span has been so utterly fried by long term exposure to algorithm-driven corporate social media that they're no longer capable of picking up whatever it is you're laying down. That, and also tacitly revealing that because they personally can't keep from fidgeting long enough to churn out two full paragraphs, that must mean no one else can, either.

I've been dropping doorstoppers on people since the days of dial-up. Back then the refrain was slightly different, but the complaint was still the same. By now my body of work, for lack of a better word, is clearly established. Hell, I cranked out so many words on the internet back in the day that Epinions sent me a hat in the mail completely unprompted for being a loquacious enough bastard to reach their list of top 100 contributors. Hands up everyone here who has actually worn out a keyboard? I suspect there are not many of us left.

At this stage in my life I take the opinion that anyone who can't handle the volume of my writing is free to attempt an airborne indignity on an ambulatory baked confectionery product. I don't have to show my homework to anyone.

I understand your logic but I hate it (and am trying not to hate you).

RESIST

It's also a snowball effect where they compete to escape the accusation of using ChatGPT or being "unc" or "boomer," self-policing to ensure everyone writes like garbage.

I was once told "I write like someone who thinks they are good at writing." That was met with rounds of applause by the people who can't (or won't) spell, capitalize, or punctuate anything.

To their credit, communication is a two-way street. If I'm writing such that nobody understands what I'm saying but me, it's not "good writing." But it does feel like we're nose-diving towards Idiocracy and I'm not happy about it.

I'd never heard about the em dash until it was used to sniff out LLM-slop, but now I have one more thing I aspire to use correctly in my writing.

I'm definitely not sure on how to use it yet.

Eh. I can live with internet paranoia.

But I’m disproportionally annoyed by posters who think they’re experts at something when they’re not. Especially so angrily/loudly, like the scenarios you point out.

It’s especially ironic in this case, as the “false confidence” AI gives is what the accusers are against, isn’t it?