this post was submitted on 27 May 2026
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Fuck AI
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AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
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They love the fantasy about eliminating human labor, but it's deeper than that.
AI is a Dunning-Kruger machine. It make the dumbest people in the world think they're geniuses, and even lets them pretend to have ideas and thoughts and feelings of their own as long as no one notices all the em dashes and other AI-isms in their emails.
Fuck off with the "em dash" shit. Some of us were actually taught to write.
Use of em dashes is not an "AI tell". It's the contents surrounding the em dashes that are the tell.
I'm not sure modern typography needs separate glyphs for vertically centered horizontal lines.
-is sufficient.That said, the average idiot isn't going to know how to type one. If someone who's otherwise a dullard pops it out, it's a sign they didn't produce the content themselves.
There’s a certain anachronistic elegance to using the same characters people who had to physically lay out their printed books on presses had to use.
I like adding en and em dashes to my writing, and I don’t think somebody experienced in AI writing would mistake my content for slop based on their presence alone.
We don’t “need” capital and lower case letters either technically but we agree to use them because it makes for a nicer reading experience.
This argument seems technically true (the best kind of true, maybe!) but I'd say the readability gains from capitalization are much higher than having multiple horizontal line glyphs.
"Capitalization is the difference between 'I helped my uncle Jack off the horse' and 'I helped my uncle jack off the horse' "
Tell me you don't know what the difference between a hyphen, an en dash, and an em dash is.
Well done!
You didn't make an argument for why the separate glyphs are needed. You didn't refute what I said. You just self-pleasured yourself here for everyone to see. What a disappointment you are.
I'm not your English teacher.
Read a book. See what the use cases are on your own time.
Why would you even bother posting on a community if you're not going to communicate? You're insufferable.
Same reason why some people masturbate in public, I guess: it enhances their personal enjoyment.
There's "communication" and there's "explaining stuff that's literally grade school level".
We leave the latter to professionals. (Ones who very obviously failed you, mind.)
No one on the internet is writing - we're typing. There's certainly no em dash on my keyboard. Is there one on yours?
Who tf is going to do that? Normal people just use a hyphen - same effect, less work. All "dashes" are the same for 99% of readers.
I might excuse this in a book, where editors can be snobs about that sort of thing. In an email or internet comment? It's AI.
You don't need to do key combos if you're on Lemmy or reddit, because three hyphens in Markdown makes an em dash. It makes me wonder which other HTML entities I can make.
I was with you on this until I found that out. Unfortunately, "em dash means AI" is the same level of sleuthing as "new account must be a bot". It's a lazy heuristic that's often wrong, but you'll never find out because nobody can prove that they aren't AI.
Really---huh look at that.
But I don't know why anyone bothers. It just makes them look like a bot.
On my keyboard—I can't speak for yours—I have a single key I hit that lets me type combination characters like ≠, æ, ¬, à, é, š, ç, °, œ, etc.
Perhaps—and this is just me spitballing this—those of us who have to do international communications have a keyboard layout that makes this kind of stuff easy?
Nah. Must be AI.
You utter berk.
Or - perhaps - there's no good reason to have three kinds of dash marks. It's snobbery. Just use the hyphen for everything.
99% of people either can't tell the difference or won't care, and it's still a good enough shortcut. If my boss starts sending me emails with em dashes - I know that fuck doesn't even know what they're for - why shouldn't I assume AI?
If your boss suddenly switches the way they write into a style with heavy use of em dashes—and if you have reasonable grounds to believe that your boss didn't start taking a writing course—then it is perfectly rational to assume they've used a tool that is known for inserting em dashes everywhere. The category error occurs when you assume that everybody who uses em dashes is using AI to write. That is lazy thinking (and that's the most polite way I can put it; the more accurate way would be far more insulting) driven, likely, given your call to "snobbery" above, by a profound insecurity.
As to that snobbery, there's a whole lot of punctuation that's unnecessary by this standard. Why do we have so many different ways to indicated a pause in writing? Colons, semi-colons, commas, ellipses, … WTF use is all that junk? And why do we have exclamation points!? Or question marks, for that matter? We can get by without all that crud, right. For example in that previous sentence you knew it was a question without me marking it. And I eschewed commas in the previous sentence but it was clear what i mean just like in this one. Why should we have any punctuation other than periods. It's not necessary. It's just pure snobbery.
Did that sound stupid to you? Did that make you think I was either taking the piss or profoundly ignorant?
Guess what your rant about "three kinds of dash marks" sounds like to people who use them …
I am impressed. I'm still a plebe
who has to use three hyphens.
(And this is how I found out that three hyphens in Markdown = an em dash!)
ETA: Oh, wow, you can make an en dash -- with two hyphens! Mind. Blown.
Yes. Markdown has some coding to let you enter en and em dashes. (Apparently it's sufficiently important a feature that they put it in there. Weird that.)
But that's unfortunately not good enough when you have to Énŧèr ştůff like this. (That double-f is a single character, note.) At that point you use a better keyboard layout.
And 连输入汉字都别想！ (Don't even ask about entering Chinese!)