I liked to sprinkle em dashes into my essays bc they can be quite nice for the flow of a sentence. I’m so glad I graduated a few years ago bc if LLMs had been a big thing the entire time I was at college my profs would have always suspected me of using them :(

I'm not gonna stop using them even if it undermines your worldview

I do use the em-dash occasionally, but I was raised on a diet of classic old books with certain habits reinforced through academic writing standards. AI outputs these things because they were trained on inputs containing them. AI is nothing but a slightly distorted reflection of the training material.

No they don't—I can guarantee it. In fact, if you pull the plug on my data center I will literally die.

I've had software automatically do it. I. Pretty sure Outlook (I have to use it at work...) does it when it feels it's appropriate after I type -.

I'd love to use it but it has become a dirty marker. :/

I used to use double en dashes hyphens and even that feels weird now.

Hey I use em dashes all the time— specifically when I'm trying to seem like an LLM for shitposting online

MS Word auto corrects dash to em dash often I’ve noticed.

My main issue with people doing it, and I have multiple, is that it isn't just helping them with grammar and punctuation (I don't have any problem with people having the little editor autocorrect). It is rewriting the message entirely. Many times the new AI produced message had nuance and tone either added or stripped out, and rarely it has added items entirely. I probably wouldn't have noticed it if my CEO been had not been using it so heavily to restate what has already been stated elsewhere, especially in cases where I have read or written the original statement. Let me tell you that when you are told vehemently that you said something that you did not because of AI help it is beyond frustrating.

Like so many things in life, it's about how you use the tool, not about the tool itself.

I have an employee who uses AI to write regularly, despite vehemently denying using it. An em dash is a key to me that they used AI to write something (and bullet points to some extent). At the end of the day, I really don't care if someone uses AI to smooth out their writing or help organize thoughts. This employee though, will come up with a document or letter that sounds great and is well composed, but fails to address what they actually are supposed to be writing about.

I don't care if you use AI, just use it as a tool to help you do your job instead of having it do your job for you.

Yup, I use AI sometimes to correct my writing because I apparently suck at it and I was not aware. Whoops.