> I learned about the em dash in high school and adapted it to my writing style very quickly for analysis and opinion documents. It felt natural given the amount of tangents I can go off into, particularly when including analogies for the reader’s understanding.

Isn't this what parenthesizes are meant for? Together with footnotes, I've always used them like that, but I guess it could also be just a cultural difference. My teachers in Swedish school always told me to put thoughts like that into parenthesizes, but I also just (barely) finished high school, could be related too.

> I find myself on the fence with proposals like these. They have good intentions but they do not solve an issue at its core.

I don't understand what the issue even is here, and the RFC also doesn't clearly outline it. Is "created ambiguity for human writers who have historically relied upon the em dash as a stylistic device" the problem here?

Trying to solve it by adding just another character and slap the label "Human Attestation Mark (HAM)" on it will just make LLMs eventually use those instead... Not sure what the point is to be honest.

I’ve leaned heavily on em-dashes over the years to help reduce my lisp-worthy overuse of parentheses. My add brain loves adding tangents, (likely unnecessary) context, and excessive completeness. I like both em-dashes and parenthesis b/c they’re visually easy to parse and skim past if the reader finds the extra detail unnecessary.

Funny enough, my kid asked me to proofread their essay the other week, and I noted some awkward comma usage and inconsistent voice. We talked through options for breaking apart sentence clauses as well as punctuation that could do the heavy lifting—specifically semicolons and em-dashes. They thought the em-dash looked cool af and semicolons looked harsh. “I love em-dashes, they’re so cool!”, was fun to hear a middle schooler say.

Ofc their teacher said that their essay was “likely 85% AI assisted.” Fortunately, the change log showed continual revisions during school hours on a managed device (ChatGPT blocked). I emailed their teacher that I had proofed it, highlighted an awkward spot or two, and pointed my kid to grammar devices they could explore themselves and apply if they wished. No harm, no foul.

Fast forward, my kid and their friend were talking about it and the friend told them to do what they do: intentionally sprinkle in grammar / spelling mistakes. le sigh I suggested to them that LLMs can easily do that too and they’re better off just learning to write well as it’s em-dash today and something else tomorrow; that the worst thing would be to dumb down style/vocab/grammar for fear of appearing LLM generated.

> especially when it was once suggested that frequent use could imply neurodivergence

Well that explains a lot. Interestingly enough, I've found that I naturally write like an LLM, or rather the LLMs write like I did. I wonder how many other patterns we attribute to LLMs are common in neurodivergent writing just as a result of so much of the training data being areas of the internet where I'd imagine neurodivergence is overrepresented vs. the general population.

> I find myself on the fence with proposals like these. They have good intentions but they do not solve an issue at its core.

It's clearly a joke à la RFC 3514.

I was always taught that overuse of the em-dash is poor style. Oftentimes using more specific punctuation (comma, semicolon, colon, parentheses) more clearly communicates the structure of a thought. Em-dashes are a lot more freeform and informal. They communicate a similar tone as when you're speaking and you suddenly stop to mention something that just occurred to you.

In this sense, the idea that "em-dash = AI" has become something of a strawman. The mere presence of em-dashes isn't what indicates AI, it's the fact that LLMs use them so frequently, and use them for formal structure (where another punctuation mark would work better) rather than informal breaking up of related thoughts.

It should have been an en dash anyway if you are to put spaces around it.

Same! I actually always preferred them because to me they’re more aesthetically pleasing, which reading aloud makes me think I might be a little neurodivergent.

>The real issue is that the social contract is broken because LLM output is attempted to be passed off as human work.

I don’t think writing with AI makes a creation "worse." If anything, it makes it better, if you bring genuine idea and imagination to it first.

The stigma comes from people being lazy and letting the AI do the heavy lifting of thinking. That’s where the "social contract" breaks. But using AI as a multiplier for your own voice and ideas isn’t "subpar"—it’s efficient.

If we start playing "whack-a-mole" with punctuation to find AI, we’re missing the point. The question isn’t what tool was used, but how much of the human's "creation" is actually in there.

conversely, and well, popularly, long sentences were given the kibosh thanks to authors like Hemmingway.

I was told the ellipses is the mark of a 4th grade poet and to never use it.

funny how things change!

> especially when it was once suggested that frequent use could imply neurodivergence

When you think folks have come up with every inventive way to pathologize a personality trait, they start gatekeeping punctuation. It’s the ultimate reach—turning a standard grammar tool into a "symptom" just to fuel the modern obsession with finding new ways to be a unique victim.

Suggesting that a horizontal line is a diagnostic "tell" for neurodivergence is peak internet brain-rot. It’s not a condition; it’s middle-school English. We’ve officially hit a level of performative absurdity where people are trying to claim clout through a keyboard stroke. It’s not a disability; it’s a stylistic choice.

I know, I find myself in this silly situation where I have to adjust my writing style because I write like an AI: always loved my bullet points and dashes.

At work I also always tended to send slightly longer but structured answers. I found that it allowed to skip over the irrelevant sections and focus on what the changes are. Eg a list of changes with in the format -> bullet point -> change name -> change details. So people could easily focus on changes they cared about. Instead of a dense paragraph that people often just skip.

Hell I even found myself wanting to add a typo just to give a more human fell, or skip final “.” to make my text imperfect and more human. That’s getting silly

never understood why -- => em-dash auto completion is only a think in some subset of application instead of being a standard behavior for (display) text inputs

I too loved using em dashes and alt codes like alt-149, my beloved, before LLMs dissolved that pleasure.

Something as simple as an alt code makes me contemplate. As the tech progresses it makes me dislike AI and those that shove it down our throats more and more.

I feel like the sum of my interests and skills from simple, Photoshop edits or learning my most used alt codes, is a lot like how the cellphone replaced some of our ability to remember phone numbers.

The machine does the thing, so why do humans need to do the thing? Or even learn about the thing?

I'm sure there are better examples than the cellphone eliminating the phonebook in my head, but I'm just thinking what are the unseen damages to humans handing over work to machines?

:::: The phone remembers the number, but what if I don't have the phone?

As a previously more involved automation career oriented person, I've heard all the catch phrases of saving the worker, and kill the repetitive tasks. It doesn't look like that ever happens, unless it's something the business world doesn't understand completely, yet have the power and authority to shape. Disgusting.

I think a better example: Everyone thinks about "how should I word this email, what's the tone, who is the audience?" Should I check every detail and work my editing skill muscle or should I simply run an idea, rather than try to form it myself, through an LLM?

Maybe it will sound better if the grammar is perfect and I will have a more effective point rather than how the message was crafted.

No harm in more effective communication, but I do foresee the serious impact the moment people that are relying on the tools lose Internet connection.

We must use these muscles, even if to first formulate a terrible, errored, humanized version. Not to look down upon ourselves with discontent when the AI that corrects it, through their wealth of stolen source material, but to have something to fall back on when the power goes out.

I digress, these RFCs are a good proposal without any strength. Just look at the theft to train these models. The models will strive to become useful to those that rely on them and just adopt the new way of writing.

    >>> "—".replace("—", "\u10EAD\u10EAC")
    'ცDცC'

Behold indeed.

    text.replace("—", "\U00010EAD\U00010EAC")

    def replace_em_dash(text: str) -> str:
        """
            +-------------------+
            |   ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡° )     |
            +-------------------+
        """
        return text.replace("—", "\U00010EAD\U00010EAC")

I feel like there is an unofficial version of AGTI already in place for certain AI providers.

Whenever I generate a large amount of code, there is a ~20% chance that my editor will pop a warning "Some unicode characters in this file could not be saved in the current codepage".

I suggest taking a look at the raw outputs of a major AI provider in a hex editor. That (zero-width) whitespace could be hiding a lot of information.

(Flashbacks from the horrors in the Byte Order Mark wars)

> For example, every other letter in this sentence is U+2060.

No it isn't! The PDF renderer has stripped them out.

Maybe considered serious by its proponents.