this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2025
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Em dashes and emojis

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[–] [email protected] 81 points 1 day ago (39 children)

You people think em dashes are proof of AI?

Jesus Christ that’s so fucking sad.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 day ago (2 children)

You are vastly underestimating the amount of people who don't use em dashes at all.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 20 hours ago (2 children)

They don't but the word processing software they likely use autocorrects them in. What's next, proper semi-colon use and Oxford commas means you're a bot?

Spelling & Grammar tool just wreaking havok.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 17 hours ago

most people aren't writing texts in a fancier word processor than their phone's default. Mine doesn't -- and I doubt every will -- correct them

[–] [email protected] 6 points 19 hours ago

I've seen more proper use of the semicolon and oxford commas than em dashes. The em dash is a lot more esoteric, that won't change.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 23 hours ago (3 children)

I don’t have a good sense of this since I am a trained writer. Is it really so low that one would reasonably conclude an AI wrote something with them?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

It's basically unseen outside of professionally written stuff. Most people use commas. But AI like to use them a fair bit, more than the average internet user.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

It seems like AI is mostly trained on academic writing then. Very interesting.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

I'd say using professional academic notation to break up with someone over text is a bigger red flag than using chatgpt to write it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 hours ago

Haha I mean, I use em dashes all the time in my writing, so it’s not really accurate to say academic (my mistake). But maybe it comes across as stupid.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 17 hours ago

the actual emdash symbol isn't really something you can do when texting from your phone

[–] [email protected] 1 points 20 hours ago

Using honest to goodness em dashes instead of just a hyphen - pretty uncommon.

Even a hyphen would be pretty unusual in a real text message, because they're more annoying to get than other common punctuation on the phone keyboard, and autocomplete won't put them in.
In a chat app, a hyphen would probably be somewhat common since it's right there on the keyboard, but a true em dash would be pretty unusual since most chat apps aren't going to be doing autocorrect like a word processor would, and you'd have to use the magic key combination to insert it.

But we don't have the original text so we can't tell if the original author confused a hyphen with an em dash, though

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