The robots have come for your em dashes

LLMs get this right in their “first drafts” because the majority of text they were trained on is itself polished—and it turns out that this level of polish covers the correct use of em dashes.

This is what happens when people don’t understand writing and think good writing must be fake.

@gregmorris There are literally meme’s from writers about how much they love the em dash…that said, Brits especially tend to use hyphens in place of an actual em dash so I could totally see how it might stand out in a group of friends.

@ChrisJWilson I think that’s mostly down to ignorance. I didn’t know there were different dashes until after uni when I was trying to improve my typesetting skills.

@ChrisJWilson @gregmorris funnily enough, I tend to get texts back with hyphens most of the time from ChatGPT and Claude. I am the one doing a replace with em-dashes.

@AlexKucera Really! I have real trouble getting British English spellings from GPT (not sure about claude, will check) even after specifically instructing it to stay in British English. And whenever I ask it to check for grammar it highlights British spelling and says that it’s not a mistake but just to be careful…even if I’ve instructed it to give British spelling.