> indirectly say that the person who wrote the piece is a bad writer

or a good writer. A lot of the so-called tells are things that are more likely to be done by professional writers under the care of a professional editor. For example, many people assume the presence of an em dash means text was written by an LLM, when obviously LLMs did not invent punctuation marks.

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viccis 12 hours ago | parent [-]

Good writers who used em dashes before AI tend to use them the traditional way—with no space around them and to emphasize a parenthetical. AI uses it with spaces around it — as an all-purpose conjunction.

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BolexNOLA 12 hours ago | parent [-]

Yeah I use em dashes probably every day. It’s only recently that people have started taking issue with it lol

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viccis 12 hours ago | parent [-]

I used to think people here didn't really use them before AI, but I actually downloaded a dataset of all comments over like a decade or so and counted the number of comments with an em dash, and it didn't actually change much around 2022-2023 like I had expected.

It's the spacing that's usually the giveaway to me, as well as the fact that it's not as common for people to use them like semicolons. They use them for parenthetical clauses more often. Any time I see them used with spaces as a general purpose conjunction, THAT'S when I think AI.

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BolexNOLA 11 hours ago | parent [-]

I have a very conversational way of writing partially because I do voice to text a lot, so the em dash just “feels” better to me than a semicolon typically.

	▲	__d 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Agreed: a semi-colon is a bit stop-start, while a en-dash just flows. I’ve used them, with spaces, for decades. Minus-minus in plain text, and autocorrect reads that nicely. I sometimes use an em-dash, but mostly in LaTeX: they’re too awkward in plain text. I use ellipses too …