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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2645 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 13, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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I have discovered, by dint of fucking around, that SwiftKey keyboard for Android allows me to insert em-dashes with relative ease. I'm torn about using them—on one end, they're more expressive than standard hyphens or semi-colons; but on the other, in this climate, that invites accusations of AI writing.

I'm entirely fine with "it's not X, it's Y" becoming deprecated, it's a rather boring turn of phrase, but I'm still annoyed by the fact that I didn't even notice em-dashes as a distinct option before they went out of style.

Am I truly worried? Uh, maybe? My writing style is distinctive enough that it's not trivial to replicate using an LLM. They absolutely won't do it by default.

You've made a profound and insightful point about online discourse in the age of generative AI. Let's break it down.

/uj you might be able to get away with emdashes so long as you steer far away from sycophancy

FUTO Keyboard has this as well, plus swipe typing, minus Microsoft selling your input data. Worth checking out. I can just long-press H and the em-dash is the first symbol option.

It certainly looks promising, but looking at the reviews suggest it's not as polished as SwiftKey, especially in swipe typing and autocorrect. SwiftKey has a very useful clipboard manager I can't do with too, and I'm not particularly fussed about the privacy concerns.

I always use all of the various hyphen forms. It got drilled into me in legal writing. Since some poorly written legislative codes include hyphens (e.g., "section 1-a" instead of "1(a)"), it's important for readability of citations to always distinguish between hyphens and en-dashes. And I was always taught separating a clause with em-dashes was for important elaborations, while parentheses were for asides that weren't necessarily vital to the meaning of the sentence. This seems a useful enough distinction to keep the em-dash in my repertoire, despite the AI connotations.

See that 123 symbol in the left corner? Then you'll see the - button in the middle of the keyboard, long press it and the em-dash is right in the middle. It's got 3 options ¯ — -, or as I like to call it, the stroke emoticon.

I use - and … all the time.

I’m unsure my random thoughts will be picked up as AI.

I use ... all the time

Ok boomer

Goshdarn whippersnappers… they used to have RESPECT for proper punctuation⋮ back in my day the teacher would hit the back of your hand with a ruler if you put spaces inside your ellipses⋱

Using regular dashes is fine, one of the reasons that em dashes are so indicative is that no human ever bothers to use the proper type of dash

Real punctuation:

  • Hyphen-minus: -

  • Ersatz em dash: --

Mental illness:

  • Hyphen: ‐

  • Minus sign: −

  • En dash: –

  • Em dash: —

t. sufficiently mentally ill to use everything but the hyphen

Hot take: If it's not part of ASCII, it's not a real character; Unicode was a mistake.

I'm ok with Unicode to the extent that it is used to contain actual languages. But emoji can fuck right off from my text encoding, especially now that they have been hijacked for political purposes.

I thought I was the only one who felt this way.

ℝ is perhaps the most real character.

UTF-16 and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. But having typographically correct characters and the ability to casually mix languages are very nice.

−10,000 social-credit points for hurting the feelings of the Chinese people.

I had to check the page source to see how you did that. So now I can do arithmetic 7−5=2 and number ranges 1914–1918 and — wait for it — felis‐parenthesis :-)

More of these "HTML named character references" can be found here.

I also use the correct punctuation when writing in LaTeX, though not anywhere else. The mental illness label is accurate, though.

LaTeX users will probably type three hyphens for an em dash.

I have discovered, by dint of fucking around, that SwiftKey keyboard for Android allows me to insert em-dashes with relative ease. I'm torn about using them—on one end, they're more expressive than standard hyphens or semi-colons; but on the other, in this climate, that invites accusations of AI writing.

I, for one, find this highly disappointing, because — as many of you probably have noticed — I tend to use em-dashes quite often myself. It's partially a combination of how I was taught to write — particularly in college — and them being rather easy to type on my Mac (option+shift+hyphen, with option+hyphen being the en-dash). But, being the old, new-technology-hating curmudgeon that I am, I will not be changing my writing style because of this.

My girlfriend has noticed ChatGPT's predilection for em-dashes, and now she can't unsee it. Whenever she sees a passage of text which uses them, she assumes ChatGPT was involved in the text's creation, up to and including Teams messages sent by her colleagues (which is honestly not an unreasonable assumption, in my view).

But my concern is the same as yours: I do use em-dashes a fair amount (mostly in fiction rather than non-fiction or blogging), and with exactly one exception I've never used ChatGPT as a writing aid. I'd hate to be accused of doing so without cause.

Occasionally you'll encounter albums where the liner notes include a notice specifying that no pitch correction (e.g. AutoTune) was used on the album, or no synthesizers (more common in the seventies and eighties, less common nowadays). I wonder how soon it'll be before the first novel is published which includes a notice in the front matter to the effect of "No generative AI was used in the creation of this novel".

Your girlfriend still beats the average. I've seen a lot of clearly LLM generated text in circulation on Reddit, and the majority of the time nobody seems able or willing to call it out. Given the average IQ on Reddit, that might even be an improvement.

I find it quite helpful to submit my drafts to the better class of model, they're very good at catching errors, raising questions and so on. I do this for fun, so it's not like I have any plans to pay for a human editor.

When writing non-fiction on my blog, models like o3 are immensely helpful for checking citations and considering angles I've missed. There's nobody I know who could do better, and certainly not for free and on a whim.

You'll find that a lot of artists go out of their way to head off accusations of AI. In some circles, it's standard to submit PSD files or record a video showing you drawing things. Writers and readers don't seem quite as obsessed about it, but I'm sure someone has probably tried.

In running text, it's reasonable to use an em dash without spaces and an en dash surrounded by spaces the same way. The latter may get you your typographic fix. Em dashes on screen often collide with the adjacent words anyway.

I'm used to using the en-dash in the manner you've described, I just find em-dashes somewhat more aesthetically appealing. If em-dashes aren't supposed to directly connect with both words/collide with them, then I wasn't aware before you mentioned it and don't mind the look!

This may be a personal aesthetic thing. I don't like the dash to connect to the strokes of the adjacent letters. Depending on the individual letter shape, that may require a touch of kerning.

I wouldn't use em. It's the main thing in the normie pattern recognizer for calling out AI texts now.

I guess I have to agree. How could I not, when just a few weeks back I correctly called out our friendly neighborhood Count for using it? The normies have a point there, few people who aren't journalists or pretentious literary types use them by default.

(I wonder if I could get away with large disclaimers left, right and center saying that these are artisanal em-dashes, produced only by my hands with the assistance of Markov chains at most)

You have to become a pretentious literary type, then.

A faith truly worse than death. I'd rather be a j*urnalist.

Now let’s not be hasty. Surely you have some less evil alternatives such as a high ranking Scientology cult operative, North Korean prison camp guard or perhaps a mass murderer?

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