this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2025
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Fuck AI
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Every time this is brought up all 13 users of the em dash come crawling out of the woodworks to say "people use em dashes all the time!" No they do not.
I mean... I do. But I'm well aware of the fact that most don't. Alt code is 0151 baby. Have had it memorized for years.
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.
"Slightly" feels like an understatement.
Hey you! Don't call me out like that, okay? :(
Bur seriously I really like em dashes when writing in a roleplay or similar texts. I think it's a nice option to style and structure some sentences. And even though not many people use them, I hate that they became a mark of shame of some kind.
No they don't—I can guarantee it. In fact, if you pull the plug on my data center I will literally die.
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.
MS Word auto corrects dash to em dash often I’ve noticed.
This is right up there with MS products replacing my double quotes with the stylized left and right quotes that end up fucking things up when copied into anything else. At least when I change them back, it doesn't keep doing it like the really old versions of Word used to when they first added that sort of functionality (yes, i'm old).
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 -.