DarrenDev an hour ago

I don't know where the recent idea that em dashes are difficult to type came from. MS Word automates turning a hyphen into an em dash as you type in the same way that it converts "teh" into "the" and has done so for as long as I can remember.

I find the whole AI / em dash thing frustrating as I used to used them all the time. They have meaning that hyphens don't. I've now had to stop using them because they are seen as AI generated, and structure my sentences differently as a result.

worldsavior 2 hours ago

It's being speculated it's because of RLHF where the humans are from some place in the world (don't remember which place) there they use emdashes.

incomingpain 4 hours ago

No. For hundreds of years authors loved to use the em dash. It was a sign of quality writing. Only very recently has it stopped getting used and only because the - is on the wrong side of the keyboard and it's becoming more a hyphen instead.

When someone uses an em dash, it implies they arent using a normal keyboard; not even dvorak.

  • daemonologist an hour ago

    Even today it's common in professional writing (high quality articles, published books). I agree though that a typical modern keyboarder is going to use a dash or semicolon instead (if anything).

  • Stoo 2 hours ago

    But an emdash is incredibly easy to type on a Mac — it's shift+option+minus, or option+minus to type an endash

  • amichail 3 hours ago

    So maybe the training data has a lot of old English writing and overcoming the model's tendency to use em dashes everywhere with custom instructions would use up more electricity.

  • rishikeshs 3 hours ago

    But MS word automatically converts a '-' to an emdash