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Notes -
t. never read print before
They barely showed up in low effort online comments. But it would be a challenge for me to find something on my (English) bookshelf that doesn't extensively use them. Let alone doesn't use them at all.
More interesting is that this is also true of the fomulation clichés like "not a X; a Y". The reason LLMs reach for these formulations is because of how extensively they are used in their trainingset. And it sounds grating because they have little sense of measure, so it feels like talking to an HR rep or a shitty journalist. But pick up almost any prose and you'll see the clichés in there.
I'm a prolific reading and I have never noticed them in any book I've read. I notice them non-stop now.
I mean it makes sense: they're literally designed so you skip over them.
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This is the change. Only LLMs and professional typesetters care about the distinction between hyphens, en dashes and em dashes, unary minus signs and binary minus signs. (All are different characters in LaTeX, but the user has to specify which one they want and generally just asks for a hyphen unless they are in math mode). To see a correctly typeset dash in casual online writing is the LLM tell. I don't think LLMs use parenthetic dashes more than I do - admittedly I use them a lot - but I would typeset them as hyphens unless my work was being professionally edited.
There is also a BrE/AmE dimension in that standard British typography (also used across the Commonwealth) sets a parenthetic dash as an en dash between spaces, whereas standard American typography sets it as an em dash without spaces. So Brits (and most non-American English speakers) who don't read print books imported from the US are seeing large numbers of em dashes for the first time.
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Yes that's the point. Em-dashes got snuck into the AI corpus through transcribed books. All of these major operations pilfered shadow archives like anna's and the various libgens. I could have lived my entire life without seeing an em-dash in digital form without any problem. And the people who claim they've always loved to use em-dashes before can go suckstart a shotgun.
That's a very harsh statement. I have been using em dashes on Reddit and on this website ever since I realized that Markdown allows users to type the HTML named character reference "&m dash;" (without the space) rather than forcing them to copy-and-paste the character from an external program.
There are always a few in every forum, don't know where you guys were 15 years ago.
I didn't start participating on Reddit until 12 years ago.
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I just made a dedicated keybind on my moonlander keyboard. I have a bunch of neat special purpose keys. :)
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Plausible though em-dashes going from vanishingly rare in online comments and marketing materials to everpresent is pretty major.
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