Em dashes and emojis
this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2025
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Yes, it's nuanced but it breaks up the sentence flow in a different way. Also used for listing things. A comma is more a small pause, like this. A semicolon is used to differentiate two independent related thoughts ; it's kind of a combination between a period and a comma. A dash can be used for many things - a longer separating of thoughts, listing different points such as this, or just as an intentional emphasis to add a more protracted pause.
Your comment has a hyphen not an em dash. The point of the post is that AI likes to include em dashes, which are wildly uncommon in modern text, as most keyboards don't have a key for it
They’re pretty trivial to make in any OS — having a dedicated key isn’t necessary.
but most people, outside of professional writers and linguists, don't use them
Odd, I see them used all the time, and I’m neither. So I guess either my experience is an outlier, everyone I talk to is secretly an LLM, or maybe the meme is pushing an easy conclusion because people in general are bad at picking up on LLM responses and want an easy punctuation mark so they don’t have to think.
Weird, i hardly ever see a normal hyphen, let alone an em dash, but of course it's not a foolproof method to detect ai, just a strong indicator