Posted by FromTheArchives 9/12/2025
They say the models were trained on a bunch of books and that they learned the use of the dash from there. That's fine, no one is denying that humans have always used dashes in their books.
But where you would bet rarely see a dash would be something like a short product review, a YouTube comment or a WhatsApp message. In these contexts the dashes can and do seem out of place.
Imaging you're an artist designing a character with 6 fingers today.
The situation is really sad. People who have the proper skills have to change how they work just to avoid "witch hunting" (for the lack of better term). What's next? If GPT-5.5 uses a lot of ellipses, are we going to stop using them? Semicolon? Will humans be using the most watered-down subset of English only at some point?
At least, that’s what I’m doing.
The key part is having the good judgement and maturity to see when that point is.
grating over pasta hills,
savory blizzard.
(/s)
Yeah, it's where I learned to use em-dashes as well.
> In these contexts the dashes can and do seem out of place.
Hmmm… For sure I use em-dashes in HN comments. I am not sure that I mentally differentiate as to whether I am in one scenario or another. (But to be sure I am not likely to leave an Amazon review though — so perhaps those contexts you called out self-select.)
But my point about the article not being convincing is just this: I can share my anecdotal evidence, you can too, we all go in a circle and it gets us nowhere. What I was expecting when I clicked the link was some actual data on dash prevalence in casual writing such as YouTube comments and a conclusion based on that data. What I got was more "Well if you look at this very particular kind of writing then extrapolate that to cover all writing then my point is made."
Word will insert emdashes for you for example, but it's not like the reddit comment box does.
It works the same way on a Mac (key repeat off) or by pressing option+shift+hyphen (key repeat on).
Yet now my hard-earned attention to detail attracts nothing but false accusations...
But nothing I type in a web form would have them.
I am. Em-dashes, like all punctuation, were invented at some point. Even the space didn't always exist, and the em-dash is a lot more recent than that.
And if it was such a vital part of punctuation, it would have been on our typewriters and therefore on our modern keyboards.
Typewriters were monospaced, which gives you extremely limited scope for distinguishing hyphens and em dashes. Small wonder that they didn’t bother attempting a distinction, and then that provided the inertia for us to never get such a thing now.
Typewriters are a lowest-common-denominator sort of thing. They lacked all kinds of widely-used stuff, and some of it they killed by their omission. Accented letters you mostly couldn’t do at all, and the rest of the time could only do by a terrible hack.
There’s a similar story in the final death of the letter thorn (þ) in English <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)#Middle_and_Earl...>: imported fonts lacked the character, so people substituted it with y which looked most similar, and that substitution became ubiquitous, and now most people think the first word in “Ye Olde Curiositie Shoppe” is pronounced /jiː/ (“ye”), whereas it was actually just how they spelled “the”, so it was /ðiː/.
It’s a general rule in such technologies: although they make many new things possible, they also damage what was there before.
Typewriters supported accented letters better than modern keyboards do. I believe on our typewriter either the ' ` and " didn't move you forward, or there was a separate key to move the same space back, so you could basically put any symbol above any letter. Kinda like how LaTeX does it.
This is normal for particular characters on non-English typewriters. Those were ‘dead keys’, ‘dead’ because the carriage didn't move. Equivalent keyboard layouts today also have dead keys. Modern dead keys can also be ‘better’, for instance, I'm told Brazil likes the dead ´ to produce á é í ó ú but also ç.
And that key was called Backspace.
Forms distinguished by width weren’t added to computer keyboards as separate keys because computer keyboards, like typewriters, solidified when computer displays were monospaced. (And, like other forms like proper opening and closing quotes, limited space on the keyboard was a concern.)
I use em dashes and semicolons and ellipses and parentheses a lot, although I barely make the leaderboard¹. My doctor says I'm human. In the pre-Unicode era of Usenet and mailing lists I used ‘ -- ’ for a long dash.
¹ https://www.gally.net/miscellaneous/hn-em-dash-user-leaderbo...
My point is that if you/we treat things "statically" we're missing the point. It's not just tech that's changing, it's society changing as a result of tech (always has been).
> It's not just tech that's changing, it's society changing as a result of tech (always has been).
True, and it goes both ways. As the cultural backlash to AI grows (see terms for it like Generative Slop, Bullshit Oracles, Regression Engines, etc) so too does people's desire to both identify and differentiate themselves from AI content and/or content that appears AI-esque.
So just know there is a significant subsection of the population that will clock such writing styles and will immediately dismiss and/or react negatively to your messages not on merit, but on "smell".
OTOH, as long as user-interactive web content has existed—so “always” in a context of a particular view of the online world—em-dashes have been part of it, because the facilities that make it easy to use (whether automatic replacement, or various keyboard input modifying mechanisms) have been sufficiently common that a robust minority of users have regularly used one or more of them.
There's nothing elegant about a punctuation mark firmly glued to the words on either side, making a sequoia-sized typographic log that typically gets wrapped in its entirety to the next line, leaving a half mile or so of white space just hanging in space before the wrap.
If you're gonna use the em dash, make sure your software can break a line on either side of one.
I frequently am accused of using LLMs to write my prose, something that I not only eschew, but also believe is morally corrupt and intellectually dishonest.
I’m not above spellcheck, grammar checkers, or even LLM driven evaluation of articles, but my thoughts, word choices, and structure are always of my own design.
I use the em-dash where it is appropriate.
I find that people accusing writers of using AI typically disagree with the premise of the text, and use the “AI” character assault as a method of dehumanising the author and dismissal of their work. The assertion is very rarely made in good faith, but rather is used as a weak attempt to discredit an idea without actually refuting the premise or even examining the argument.
Shame on whoever argues in this way, it’s weak, unproductive, and intellectually lazy. It’s fine to disagree, but if you aren’t willing to act in good faith, just keep your thoughts to yourself. You’re only going to discredit your own point of view if you touch the keyboard.
For lack of an easy way to type it on my computer I tend to use parentheses (which effectively serve the same purpose) but will opt for an em dash more often when typing on my phone at the risk of bookish messages and notes.
Coworkers have emailed me before suggesting a certain course of action which I can tell is heavily influenced by an LLM. "I think we should X because Y" to which I just think "Is this really what you know and believe?". If I wanted an LLM to answer I could have asked it myself. But I don't accuse — I ask for more evidence or a better argument because if I'm forced to work with an LLM by proxy I am going to reflect the burden of dealing with one back to the author.
That being said, fyi, most Linux distros (or at least many!) have by default the shortcut `ctrl+shift+U` then the hex value of the Unicode character.
So, for example, the en dash is U+2013 and the em dash is U+2014, so you would press `ctrl+shift+U` then type in "2014" then space and it inputs it!
I use it all the time! It's very useful!
Personally, I'm more prone to excessive semicolon usage, which seems to aggravate editors.