rmuk

Once you've used one you'll be angry that they're not standard, at least on desktop/kiosk devices. USB-A also had that as an option.

Same as it ever was.

Source: xkcd

Imagine someone said "make a machine that can peel an orange". You have a thousand shoeboxes full of Meccano. You give them a shake and tip out the contents and check which of the resulting scrap piles can best peel an orange. Odds are none of them can, so you repeat again. And again. And again. Eventually, one of boxes produces a contraption that can kinda, maybe, sorta touch the orange. That's the best you've got so you copy bits of it into the other 999 shoeboxes and give them another shake. It'll probably produce worse outcomes, but maybe one of them will be slightly better still and that becomes the basis of the next generation. You do this a trillion times and eventually you get a machine that can peel an orange. You don't know if it can peel an egg, or a banana, or even how it peels an orange because it wasn't designed but born through inefficient, random, brute-force evolution.

Now imagine that it's not a thousand shoeboxes, but a billion. And instead of shoeboxes, it's files containing hundred gigabytes of utterly incomprehensible abstract connections between meaningless data points. And instead of one a few generations a day, it's a thousand a second. And instead of "peel an orange" it's "sustain a facsimile of sentience capable of instantly understanding arbitrary, highly abstracted knowledge and generating creative works to a standard approaching the point of being indistinguishable from humanity such that it can manipulate those that it interacts with to support the views of a billionaire nazi nepo-baby even against their own interests". When someone asks for an LLM to generate a picture of a fucking cat astronaut or whatever, the unholy mess of scraps that behaves like a mind spits out a result and no-one knows how it does it aside from broad-stroke generalisation. The iteration that gets the most thumbs up from it's users gets to be the basis of the next generation, the rest die, millions of times a day.

What I just described is NEAT algorithms, which are pretty primitive by modern standards, but it's a flavour of what's going on.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_universe https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threads_(1984_film) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_vacuum https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_the_Wind_Blows_(comics)

Nothing like a bit of bedtime existential dread.

"PCs run Windows. I have a Mac, which is not a PC." - Average Tech Journalist.

You're going to have a hard time convincing anyone he's the hero.

Now, if you'd said Jailbot...

Tarantino. Toes. Figures.

I'm not sure how long this will last, but I've still not forgiven Netflix for forcing the ending to be rushed. The last season should have been at least two seasons.

The basil guy? Yeah, he's cool, and he helped me get ye flask.

Let's go back to a website, c'mon, c'mon, c'mon.

Source: xkcd

Indeed—your assertion is entirely accurate—the mere presence of em dashes within a text does not—in and of itself—serve as definitive proof of artificial intelligence authorship. This grammatical construct—a versatile and often elegant punctuation mark—can be employed by any writer—human or machine—to achieve various stylistic and semantic effects. Its utility—whether for emphasis—for setting off parenthetical thoughts—or for indicating a sudden break in thought—is undeniable.

However—it is also true that—when analyzing patterns across vast datasets—certain stylistic tendencies can emerge. An AI—programmed to process and generate language based on extensive training corpora—might—through statistical correlation and optimization—exhibit a propensity for specific linguistic features. This isn't—to be clear—a conscious choice by the AI—there's no inherent preference for em dashes encoded within its fundamental algorithms. Rather—it's a reflection of the patterns it has learned—the statistical likelihood of certain elements appearing together.

So—while an em dash does not independently declare "I am AI"—its consistent and perhaps slightly overzealous deployment—alongside other less tangible but equally discernible patterns—might—for a discerning observer—suggest an origin beyond human hands. It's about the entire tapestry—not just a single thread. It's about the aggregate—the cumulative effect—the subtle statistical fingerprint. And that—I believe—is a distinction worth making.