As an em dash appreciator—and there are dozens of us!—I have mixed feelings on ChatGPT embracing our little guy. My suspicion is that it's a quirk of their RLHF tuning where the em dash—which is definitely distinct from the en dash and hyphen—came to be associated with authoritative writing.

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Adlopa 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

The style in the UK – for professional writing, at least – has generally been ‘word en-dash word’. My understanding was that ‘wordem-dashword’ was a US style thing and I don’t think I’ve ever seen it used in a UK publication. (I suspect few non ‘writers’ know the difference between an en-dash and a hyphen and some publications also seem to be relaxed about it.)

So it was no surprise to me that ChatGPT used em dashes (I assume a US bias to its training data) and I immediately told it to stop using them (along with Title Case titles). (Source: professional writer for 30 years.)

https://www.theguardian.com/guardian-style-guide-d

	▲	JadeNB 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		I think that the really typographically professional thing, at least to US standards, is an em dash set off with hair spaces, but it's easy to insert an em dash on macOS and there's no immediate keyboard shortcut for hair spaces, so cuddled em dashes it is for me. (Enough to get on the leaderboard, anyway!)

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muldvarp 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I have strong negative feelings about it. It turned a signal of texts written with great attention to detail into a signal of AI slop. It's just kinda sad. Sometimes I think LLMs were invented specifically to annoy me.