alt Hacker NewsDid people not read articles and books with em-dashes before LLMs? Why are we pretending nobody used them before? It's one of the first things people learn to typeset properly when learning LaTeX for the first time, not to mention so many books we grew up reading used them regularly.
I loved em-dashes --- I still do (as you can see, I'm partial to AP style ;)) But most people never understood the difference between hyphens, en-dashes and em-dashes in the first place. Or that The King's English uses en-dashes where US English uses em-dashes. Merriam-Webster has a short and amusing -- to me -- article on this topic [1]. So all kinds of "dashes" are rolled into the "em-dash is an AI tell" hysteria.
That LLMs use them all the time is also a good indicator that there are alot to be found in the training material.
[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/how-to-use-and-under...