100%. I had my first obviously AI-written email the other day, and that was one of the clear tells.

I was trying to figure out what made it so obvious, the dashes were one thing, the other things I noticed were:

- Bits of the text were in bold.

- The tone was horrible, very cringe. Full of superlatives, adjectives and cliches.

- I live somewhere where English is the third language, most people don't write emails in English without a few spelling or grammar mistakes.

- Nor do they write in paragraphs.

- It's also pretty unusual to get a quick reply.

Lots of these things are positive, I guess. I'm glad folks are finding it easier to communicate quickly and relatively effectively across languages, but it did kinda make me never want to do business with them again.

> The tone was horrible, very cringe. Full of superlatives, adjectives and cliches.

I wonder how much of this is caused by the AI companies using Reddit as a major training source.

Bold text is a give away. I'm sad about the hyphens because I use them in my normal typing :(.

If you can clearly read it in your head in that new sassy GPT voice, it's probably LLM

This also just sounds like the average sales email haha.

Not OP, but… what? On Windows I have a trigger finger for Alt+0133, Alt+0150, and Alt+0151. I use proper ellipses, en–dash, and em—dash all the time.

On Linux (maybe only certain distros, not sure) the keys are different, but you can enable a Compose key and enable special character keybinds as well.

For example on Mint en–dash is "<compose> <minus> <minus> <period>" and em—dash is "<compose> <minus> <minus> <minus>"

Being aware of Alt character codes puts you in the top 1% of computer users for ability.

Knowing what a file is puts you in the top 1% of computer users for ability. What's your point?

I do a similar thing on Linux with a feature called the "Compose Key". I press the compose key (caps-lock on my keyboard), and then the next couple of keypresses translate into the proper character. "a -> ä, ~n -> ñ, etc.

Good grief, memorising arcane key combos? Doesn't sound ready for the desktop!

100%. if i type it much less eloquent ;D wrote a whole maze of words and had chatgpt untie it.

Kind of ironic given what you are posting about. I think I need to get off the internet

happy you spotted that ;>. you should definily stay on the interwebz!

Since there's a human behind the wheel, I'll ask:

Are you actually measuring the load-time bottlenecks in devTools?

I don't know the exact details but it appears a lot of sites are sitting around waiting on ad-tech to get delivered before they finish loading content.

great, now I have to un-learn using 'proper' punctuation.

It's AltGr+[-] (–) or AltGr+Shift+[-] (—) on my keyboard layout (linux, de-nodeadkeys) btw.

AltGr+[,] is ·, AltGr+Shift+[,] is ×, AltGr+[.] is …, AltGr+[1] is ¹

[Compose][~][~] is ≈, [Compose][_][2] is ₂ (great for writing H₂O), [Compose][<][_] is ≤, etc.

I use all of these, and more, guess I'm an AI now :(

To be fair I intentionally use — incorrectly by putting spaces around it, just because I hate how it looks without the spaces ("correct" English grammar says there should be no spaces.)

People can pry my em dashes from my cold, dead hands.

It provides an interesting test case for the usefulness (or lack thereof) of AI detectors:

ZeroGPT: Your Text is Human written (0% AI GPT)

QuillBot: 0% of text is likely AI

GPTZero: We are highly confident this text was ai generated. 100% Probability AI generated

Grammarly: 0% of this text appears to be AI-generated

None of them gave the actual answer (human written and AI edited), even though QuillBot has a separate category for this (Human-written & AI-refined: 0%).

What's wrong with dashes?

It’s not just the em dash—it’s the juxtaposition.

Nobody types em-dashes.

I do! Alt-0151 on Windows. I'm not an AI, though... (and you can also write in Word and copy-paste here)

this puts you on a desktop with a full-size keyboard or a laptop with a numpad then, which is a very small minority these days with a definite dev-centric skew.

Indeed I am, but the point here is that some users are actually typing em-dashes outside word processors or publishing/typesetting tools (e.g., on HN)—so it's not necessarily a sign of a message written by an AI (m-dash pun intended). The poster could as well be a developer with a full-size keyboard.

On many Android keyboards you can press and hold various keys to get access to many of the "extra" punctuation characters and fancy "foreign" letters. I imagine the same is also true on Apple phones as well.

I do—commented on another thread, but:

  On Linux (maybe only certain distros, not sure) the keys are different, 
  but you can enable a Compose key and enable special character keybinds as well.
  
  For example on Mint:
    en–dash is "<compose> <minus> <minus> <period>"
    em—dash is "<compose> <minus> <minus> <minus>"

People with iPhones do. If you type a double hyphen on iOS — it is replaced with an em dash. Three periods also become an ellipsis…

iOS autocorrects -- to an em dash. I do it a lot.

Though true I would have spaces around it.

I do. I also type en-dashes where appropriate, and ellipses, and balanced quotes.

i only type balanced quotes and parentheses because otherwise GCC will get mad at me!:

edit: failed to compile. missing semicolon

on Mac its super simple–option + (minus)–so I use it all the time.

I do. One of the first customizations I make on a new Linux install is mapping the compose key—em-dashes are then <compose> followed by two dashes.

On Mac, it's configured by default: <option>+<shift>+dash

It would really be disappointing if typographic pedants start being falsely accused of being AI.

I do—daily, too.

quite surprised this comment got so much debate after i immediately agreed i used chatgpt -or did i? (u see i dont know how to punctuate , i am not so punctual!)

Uh oh. I use em dashes all the time in writing. Am I an AI?