Using the HN public dataset in Google BigQuery [0], which I think fits easily in the amount of free queries allowed:
SELECT
EXTRACT(YEAR FROM timestamp) AS year,
SUM(CASE WHEN text LIKE '%—%' THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) AS withDash,
COUNT(*) AS total,
SUM(CASE WHEN text LIKE '%—%' THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) / COUNT(*) AS fraction
FROM `bigquery-public-data.hacker_news.full`
WHERE type = 'comment'
GROUP BY year
ORDER BY year;
year with— total frac
2006 0 12 0.000
2007 13 70858 0.000
2008 461 247922 0.001
2009 1497 491034 0.003
2010 3835 842438 0.005
2011 4719 1044913 0.005
2012 5648 1246782 0.005
2013 7881 1665185 0.005
2014 8400 1510814 0.006
2015 9967 1642912 0.006
2016 12081 2093612 0.006
2017 14530 2361709 0.006
2018 19246 2384086 0.008
2019 23662 2755063 0.009
2020 27316 3243173 0.008
2021 32863 3765921 0.009
2022 34657 4062159 0.009
2023 36611 4221940 0.009
2024 32543 3339861 0.010
2025 30608 2231919 0.014
So there's definitely been an increase.
Querying for the users who use "—" most as a proportion of all their comments:
SELECT
`by`,
SUM(CASE WHEN text LIKE '%—%' THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) / COUNT(*) AS fraction,
COUNT(*) AS total,
MIN(timestamp) AS minTime,
MAX(timestamp) AS maxTime
FROM `bigquery-public-data.hacker_news.full`
WHERE
type = 'comment' AND
timestamp < '2022-11-30'
GROUP BY `by`
HAVING COUNT(*) > 100
ORDER BY fraction DESC
LIMIT 250;
zmgsabst uses them the most [1], westoncb [2] is an older account that uses them fourth-most.
I’d be interested in seeing how the data changes if instead of the total raw number of posts with em-dashes you instead check for their percentage considering the total number of posts. I guess the folks who registered later would be bumped up the list?
Had the same thought. I don’t show up on this leaderboard, but I’m #42 on the “more complete” leaderboard. I’m #8 when sorting by max in a single comment—which makes even me think I may have overdone it. Finally—HN top 50 and top 10 in something I love!
The em-dash giveaway is an actual Unicode em-dash character, right? I professionally had to learn Latex to write a paper in the 1990s and picked up a "---" habit ever since, and I've been wondering if that's some kind of weird LLM tell now.
There's an easy keyboard shortcut for it on Macs. I always saw it as a signifier of "Mac user with enough interest in writing style to use em-dashes instead of parentheses."
But I'm not on a Mac right now so I don't know how to even make a real one at the moment other than that LaTeX method.
Easy is almost an understatement; it's Alt+Hyphen. [Edit: My bad that's en-dash, can't tell the difference in this monospaced text field. Em-dash you have to hold shift.]
I guess on Windows it's Alt+0,1,5,1 on a numpad. Or you copy+paste from Character Map.
Not just Apple users. The compose-key does this on a variety of desktop operating systems, where the shortcut is COMPOSE - - - for em-dash, and - - . for en-dash.
It's more the style of setting up contrasts that's the real llm tell. That they happen to use a typographic mark that most people don't know how to type is just fuel on the fire.
Em-dashes are only incidentally related to contrasting statements like that, too. My main use of them is quasi-parenthetical interpolation. It can be nice when you want more emphasis on the aside, or just to avoid using parens or commas if you started writing something that already uses them.
Anyone who types in MS word for the improved spell checker and then copies their comment to a browser will automatically get hyphens changed to em-dashes.
The fact that its not very useful for the forms of writing most people participate in nowadays--short form responses that are heavily contextual. Even longer form writing is often labored over--people use LLMs for outdated types of communication, like long-winded emails or school papers.
Idk, working in the AI space, I've started to write very succinctly and straight to the point, maybe as a counterweight to the often overly flattering, verbose forms of prose that the LLMs employ. I pay close attention to every word and try to never write more than is necessary.
Short message easy if just 'orange man good' or 'orange man bad' but what if want to explain reason also? Dumb down? What if discussion too dumb already?
A compose key is very useful if you’re a typography snob — as many of us who studied mathematics and ended up learning TeX probably are… I haven’t been paying attention to exactly what I’ve typed with it lately, but I habitually use symbols like these on autopilot and they seem to render OK on any device that someone reading my writing is likely to be using:
≤ ≥ ≠ × — – “ ” ’ ° … ¹ ² ³ ™ • ♣ ♢ ♡ ♠
If you work in languages other than English but have a standard English keyboard layout, a compose key is handy for typing accents and non-English letters/ligatures too.
I primarily work in Danish; but I use a US Intl AltGrDead[0] keymap, so I can access most needed symbols without the compose key, such as æ (altgr+z), ø (altgr+l) and å (altgr+w). But I still wanted to write ⅚ more easily, so I also added the compose key for even more symbols.
[0] The AltGrDead variant just means that the regular dead keys on the US Intl are flipped; e.g. ' is now no longer dead per default: I have to hit altgr+' to make it dead (i.e. an acute accent (´)).
I remember participating in a small thread on how to type an em-dash, on different OS's. It was in March 2023, so before the em-dash meme had started—it was an innocent question then.
I think they meant after the release of ChatGPT. If someone never used them before and now uses them all the time it might indicate that they're using ChatGPT... or it might just mean that they learned how to use them after widespread discussions about it.
More generally any measurable feature of writing that underwent a significant change in frequency around that time would be interesting to look at. Looking at frequencies across the entire post dataset would suggest likely candidates, which individual people could then be tested against. There would be lots of confounding factors and red herrings though -- like the word "ChatGPT" itself!
I missed the point of the leaderboards completely. It is to show exactly that when you get blamed for using AI to write. You can point out that you already used it in 2009 or whatever. For that it is very useful yes :-)
Even more interesting is the likely increase in emdash usage by those not using an LLM, but merely imitating the writing they see subconsciously. There was a evidence that chatgpt is shifting the frequency of use of some uncommon words and phrases amongst non-users.
I actually just tried this out using a HN dataset from HuggingFace today. I did # of comments with emdash / total comments. It shot up in 2018 for some reason and then, at the very end of the dataset, seemed to start spiking late 2024. Sadly it didn't have 2025 data, but it was enough to convince me that maybe the emdash lovers who complain haven't been lying about using it pre-genAI.
As an em dash appreciator—and there are dozens of us!—I have mixed feelings on ChatGPT embracing our little guy. My suspicion is that it's a quirk of their RLHF tuning where the em dash—which is definitely distinct from the en dash and hyphen—came to be associated with authoritative writing.
I think this whole em dash topic should lead to some deeper (though not very deep) conversations:
* If it was not widely used before where/how did (chat)GPT picked it up?
* If it was widely used, then it shouldn't be a topic at all. But, there seems to be informal agreement that it wasn’t widely used.
* Or, could GPT have inferred that even though it's not widely used, it's the better way to go (to use it). Which then makes one wonder about the whole probability of next token idea. Maybe this line of thinking falls too short of what might be really going on internally.
* If it had picked up something that is widely used but in the wrong way, it should make us pause (again) about the future feedback loops these LLMs, which aren't going away, are already creating. Not just in terms of grammar and spelling but also in terms of way of thinking and seeing the world.
The training sets of most LLMs contain a copious amount of content from Libgen (or now: Anna's Archive), where em dashes are frequently used in literary writing.
It isn't about wide use. It is about a character that almost no-one enters explicitly. Nearly all usages are copy paste, or inadvertent/unintended conversion by an application such as Microsoft Word that converts regular quotes to smart quotes, etc. In that respect, we see that an AI is performing identically to a real human. An AI does not and most likely would not add see a purpose an em or en dash to any text, unless it was an article about em or en dashes, or they knew the person they were speaking with uses en or em dashes.
It's used a lot in formal writing (academic papers, books etc) which are probably a large portion of chatGPTs training. If the HRL was done by professional writers then it was probably additionally biased toward using them.
People are more casual on the web. It's sort of like how people can often tell when it's me in IM without my name because I properly use periods while that's unusual in that medium. ChatGPT is so correct it feels robotic.
It’s the most likely explanation I believe. I have no idea about the content distribution of the training data but I would have assumed twitter and Reddit content would completely dwarf the literary content. Somewhat good that if it’s indeed not the case!
But an ellipsis is separate from and doesn't mmerge with sentence-terminal punctuation, whether its a period or somethig else (when it replaces words at the end of a sentence, the terminal punctuation follows the ellipsis, when at the beginning of a sentence that follows another, the ellipsis follows the punctuation.) The constructs you say can't be formed with it aren't needed.
Hmm, yeah, you’re right – in English this isn’t really used. However it’s a widely used punctuation in Russian (and many ex-USSR languages, too), so... no, they are needed in some cases.
This is why we only had ascii in the start. You don't need those other characters anyway. (For english...)
Meanwhile there are a lot of languages and cultures. Somewhere all those characters were useful for something. My Atari had a very fun utility that gave you a compose-key that could combine just about everything on the keyboard to access all those weird characters of the extended ascii table. <compose>+ao would give you "a" with a ring on top (å), <compose>+ae gave the danish welded together character that I can't even type any more on windows.
Thanks, have tried that one but I just don't write enough and the special characters I need is natively on my keyboard. But it's very nice for those that actually do write other things than code :-)
The one thing LLMs do well is manipulating text. The danger is obviously that it will reduce individual expression and make everything the same mediocre sludge.
For me writing is a way to capture a stream of consciousness so I don’t really see the advantage of using an LLM.
When I see some trivial mediocrity I simply stop reading. It’s just not interesting.
As with most things, it can get interesting if you don't rely on defaults. My personal amusement in that area includes chatting up fictional characters with unique 'voices'. And even simple capture of consciousness can get more interesting if you apply stylometric analysis to it.
Microsoft word converts your dashes to em-dashes for you automatically, for a least the last decade. So as a sibling comment said, if it's professionally written, there are probably em dashes used more than regular ones.
This second version was vibe-coded with Codex CLI. I also tried Gemini CLI, but it didn’t work very well. The SQL scripts I ran at BigQuery were by Claude.
I am not a programmer or web designer, so I will leave these pages as they are, warts and all. It was a fun project, though. I never would have attempted something like this pre-vibe-coding.
Is the amount of em dashes counted or the comments that have at least one em dash inside them?
You know, I am asking for...science(?).
I also wanted to point out that these could be Kantonese/Mandarin/Japanese/SouthEast Asian users that use their local keymapping software because a lot of them use the idiom symbols (e.g. the dot character, too) when they switch to the English keymaps.
Check out how laptops usually look like over there, a lot of manufacturers build that right into the firmware.
This is kind of pointless given that iOS’s autocorrect has been adding em dashes, ellipsis and smart quotes to comments since… forever.
(Like now)
It’s become a weird kind of witch hunting regarding blogs, too, and I have a 20+ year old site that renders all of its content using Markdown extensions that do the same (and that also convert dual hyphens to em dashes—something I’ve been typing for about as long).
Yeah exactly, I use em dashes, and somewhat expected to be on the leaderboard :-) But I type them as two hyphens --
On my desktop, the two hyphens remain literal. But on iOS, it turns into an em dash I think. Although it seems like I get the smart quotes more often than the em dash
I use m-dashes excitedly ever since I discovered how easily available they are on the quite smart, yet completely offline android keyboard — FUTO keyboard
This site seems to be about identifying users who used emdash BEFORE ChatGPT was released, therefore identifying who is likely not ChatGPT despite using emdashes
OpenAI’s o3 was big on en dashes—one time it produced a Deep Research result containing >200 of them. I’m not aware of any other LLM using them commonly, though. I’d guess humans use them even less often; I don’t think Apple auto-inserts en dashes, and very few people (myself being one) are pedantic enough to bother.
On the other hand, I don’t think o3 was ever a common choice among people copying from LLMs, so en dashes remain infrequent regardless.
In German en dashes are more common than em dashes. I’ve been using them regularly for at least 20 years, both in German and English texts. I never liked it when people just threw in ordinary hyphen instead of an en dash, but few people note the difference.
They're very easy to type on a Mac though (opt+-). I've always used spaced en dashes without realising that that is the more common British style. Unspaced em dashes just look wrong to me.
Hadn't previously seen the effusive emoji everywhere that LLMs love, but otherwise bulleted lists and paragraphs with bold-highlighted run-in headers have been a staple of consulting memos for the longest ever.
Very effective way to summarize reports, recommendations, or analysis. IME well-received and appreciated by those consuming complex info for the first time.
Still love the style, though one does need to soft-shoe it so as to not scream "this is LLM copypasta!"
I'm actually one of the people who use em dash regularly. I treat it like a pause—like sighing. It's very easy to type it on a Mac it becomes muscle memory: Opt+Shift+Dash.
Compose key, alt key codes, WinKey + . on Windows—there are many ways. It's also easy to do on most phone keyboards by holding down the hyphen key for more options.
Slightly tweaked, a leaderboard of em dash containing comments after ChatGPT release, limited to users who used them in fewer than 1% of comments before ChatGPT release, and who posted at least 200 comments before and after ChatGPT release. Data is recent (August 28th).
Of course this doesn't mean they're using ChatGPT either, they could've switched devices or started using them because they felt like it.
WITH by_user AS (
SELECT
`by` AS user,
COUNTIF(text LIKE '%—%') AS match_count,
COUNT(*) AS total_count,
(timestamp >= '2022-11-30') AS after_chatgpt
FROM `bigquery-public-data.hacker_news.full`
WHERE type = 'comment'
GROUP BY user, after_chatgpt
),
combined AS (
SELECT
user,
MAX(IF(NOT after_chatgpt, match_count, 0)) AS match_before_chatgpt,
MAX(IF(NOT after_chatgpt, total_count, 0)) AS total_before_chatgpt,
MAX(IF(after_chatgpt, match_count, 0)) AS match_after_chatgpt,
MAX(IF(after_chatgpt, total_count, 0)) AS total_after_chatgpt,
FROM by_user
GROUP BY user
HAVING total_before_chatgpt >= 200 AND total_after_chatgpt >= 200
),
with_fractions AS (
SELECT
*,
SAFE_DIVIDE(match_before_chatgpt, total_before_chatgpt) AS fraction_before_chatgpt,
SAFE_DIVIDE(match_after_chatgpt, total_after_chatgpt) AS fraction_after_chatgpt
FROM combined
)
SELECT
user,
FORMAT('%d/%d (%.0f %%)', match_before_chatgpt, total_before_chatgpt, ROUND(fraction_before_chatgpt*100)) AS before_chatgpt,
FORMAT('%d/%d (%.0f %%)', match_after_chatgpt, total_after_chatgpt, ROUND(fraction_after_chatgpt*100)) AS after_chatgpt
FROM with_fractions
WHERE fraction_before_chatgpt < 0.01
ORDER BY fraction_after_chatgpt DESC
LIMIT 15
Indeed, that is interesting, the author could probably spit out that answer in seconds. As - for the most part, anyway - a traditionalist and ASCII7 adherent I find it funny to think about how this is probably also a good indicator of the age of the writer.
I started using emdashes in my academic career, after my advisor pointed me to the subtle differences. And since then, I like and use emdash a lot. In Latex, it is easily produced, just keep the spacing rules in mind. The Punctuation Guide is a nice reference on it https://www.thepunctuationguide.com/
There are actually four different "dashes" in La/TeX. The hyphen (-), en-dash (--) which is used for numeric rangen like 1--2, the em-dash (---) for punctuation, and the minus sign ($-$). Knuth talks about them in the TeXbook which is good fun.
Not in ASCII. My definition of plain text is roughly "the characters I have on my keyboard". Unicode is like a superset of all possible plain texts. Useful, but I really don't like my own files containing characters I can't (easily) type. If I regularly typed in another language I would acquire a keyboard for that language. I'm not even convinced typographical symbols like various dash types even belong in Unicode at all to be honest. It seems like you have to draw a very arbitrary line somewhere.
I suspect they are generated via "autocorrect", the same way as "smart (more like stupid) quotes" and other characters that tend to cause a great deal of frustration should they find their way into source code. It would be interesting to see how many users regularly make posts containing non-ASCII characters.
Between the comments running correlations BC and AC, things still seem inconclusive.
@dang - can we add it to the HN guidelines that we should not or should call out AI when we see it? On one hand people might get defensive and the threads get out of hand. On the other hand, we don’t want AI slop.
Place 33. I hate the whole LLMs em-dash thing since I now have to consider how em-dash usage impacts the perception of those reading what I wrote.
At least I tended to use em-dash always with spaces surrounding it — like so. I know the anglospace-convention is to use it without spaces, but I just don't like that visually. At least one way to tell me apart from typical LLM-generated text.
As #10 on this list, here’s how I do it on my laptop.
I remap a key to the right of Space to Compose, and add various custom sequences. Before long, I was completely comfortably and casually typing dashes and curly quotes and more, and in fact it takes conscious effort for me to limit myself to ASCII when typing prose. (Writing code, writing *, /, -, ' and " is easy. But writing prose, I genuinely will write ×, ÷ if it feels the right one in that place, −, ‘/’ and “/”.)
On one previous laptop keyboard I mapped Menu, on my current one RAlt is more suitable.
When on Windows, I use WinCompose. On Linux, I used to just use it bare, which had advantages and disadvantages—apps implement a Compose key inconsistently, some messing things up related to includes and some handling overlapping sequences differently. More recently I wanted to be able to type Telugu and installed fcitx5 which is no longer mostly broken under Wayland like it was last time I tried, so now fcitx5 is handling the Compose sequences across the entire system, and working more consistently. Also I can use Ctrl+Alt+Shift+U and get a popup where I can search Unicode by code or description. Now if only that pesky popup would handle Shift+Space and Ctrl+Backspace itself rather than letting them fall through to the parent…
(caps:backspace isn’t entirely relevant here, but it’s on the same line and I choose to mention it. When people are remapping Caps Lock, I’ve never understood why so many seem to choose to make it Escape. Just extend the left hand and slap the corner of the keyboard with the ring finger, it’s not a huge movement and is easy to reach and return. Backspace, however, tends to be needed at least as often (and yes, I say that despite using Vim), and is much harder to hit. In my mind, a far better candidate for shifting to that prime real estate.)
include "/usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose"
include "/home/chris/.XCompose-kragen"
Then I add all kinds of additions. Lots of fine typography stuff like zero-width space and non-joiner, narrow no-break space, thin space… a few more hyphen/dash mappings… and lots of other things like nice emoji sequences, music notation stuff, Greek letters matching Vim digraphs, superscript ordinals (ˢᵗ, ⁿᵈ, ʳᵈ, ᵗʰ), the keyboard shortcut symbols macOS uses (⌘⌃⌥⇧⌫ and another dozen less common ones), control pictures like ␆, and a handful of other things.
When all’s said and done:
• Compose - - - gets me — EM DASH (stock)
• Compose - - . gets me – EN DASH (stock)
• Compose - - = gets me − MINUS SIGN (custom)
• Compose - - w gets me ⸺ TWO EM DASH (custom; w for wide)
• Compose - - W gets me ⸻ THREE EM DASH (custom; W for Wider)
The last two I use occasionally, the other three I use very frequently. I went through a phase of using HYPHEN and SOFT HYPHEN, now I seldom use them.
I also like to write &c. (italic where supported) for et cetera.
For quotation marks, I also use custom mappings:
<Multi_key> <semicolon> <semicolon> : "‘" U2018 # LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK
<Multi_key> <apostrophe> <apostrophe> : "’" U2019 # RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK
<Multi_key> <colon> <colon> : "“" U201c # LEFT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK
<Multi_key> <quotedbl> <quotedbl> : "”" U201d # RIGHT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK
Think about how you physically type them, and I reckon these mappings make a lot of sense, very easy to type. Much better than the stock bindings (<' >' <" >") or kragen ones (`Space 'Space `` ''; or 6' 9' 6" 9").
—⁂—
(Oh yeah, that one’s <Multi_key> <h> <r> : "—⁂—".)
Now, I have one question I’d like answered. Overlapping sequences. If you have -> → and <- ← you’re fine, but when you add <-> ↔, I can’t find any way of using the <- sequence any more. Before fcitx5, some apps would ignore one or the other (in ways difficult to explain which I think involved the fact that some definitions came from includes), and some would let you terminate the sequence early and match the shorter one (e.g. Compose < - Enter). Is there some proper solution I’ve missed?
I have plans for an article on my keyboard arrangements, including sharing a full .XCompose, but I’m going to finish my next major revision to my website first. Because then I’ll be able to draw things instead of just writing.
—⁂—
On mobile, I think I use FUTO keyboard at present, which lets me access most of these things, but not elegantly. I want to make my own keyboard layout that lets me access the good stuff more easily, but I haven’t got to it yet.
Also: anyone want to join me in advocating for completion dictionaries and libraries to replace their ' apostrophes with ’, or at least to support both approaches equally? I’m fed up with not having this stuff, Vim is the only place where it was straightforward to get it about right, and mobile is just a mess.
> If you have -> → and <- ← you’re fine, but when you add <-> ↔, I can’t find any way of using the <- sequence any more.
X11 is likely walking a tree of .XCompose entries with each keypress. Once it gets to '<' and '-' it finds '←' and does not continue to consider your next '>'. So, you need to provide a way to walk a different path.
This works for me.
<Multi_key> <less> <period> <greater> : "↔"
It is like how EN DASH is "--." to be distinct from EM DASH's "---".
In general we must consider the entirety of .XCompose when choosing new compose key bindings. Maybe there is some utility to help with that. For me, I removed 98% of the default Compose file entries which makes manual checking feasible.
I guess I’m confused. Why is it interesting to know how many em dashes were used before the dawn of ChatGPT? It’s how many AFTER that seems like it would be far more interesting.
Because it’s becoming a common belief that any em-dash indicates LLM writing, and us people who regularly use em-dashes are attempting to show that is a poor signal on its own. The goal is to show proof of humans using it.
As mentioned in the thread that included dang’s suggestion [1], examples of one’s use of em dashes timestamped before ChatGPT could be used as a defense if one is accused, on the basis of em dashes, of having written with AI.
Things like books are proof that actual humans use em dashes, that wasn't ever the contention.
What's needed is a writing comparison before/after 2022 for these users. If there's a sudden 200% increase in the use of em-dashes from one month to the next, it's a very strong indicator that the user started LLMing their posts.
Given that GPT-3.5 (like many LLMs) was trained with a large corpus of scraped internet data, including popular discussion fora, the people on the leaderboard are the ones potentially to blame for ChatGPT’s em-dash habit.
Using the HN public dataset in Google BigQuery [0], which I think fits easily in the amount of free queries allowed:
So there's definitely been an increase.Querying for the users who use "—" most as a proportion of all their comments:
zmgsabst uses them the most [1], westoncb [2] is an older account that uses them fourth-most.[0] https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/product/y-combi...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=zmgsabst
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=westoncb
I took a peak at zmgsabst's comments, but they use them with spaces around the dash — like this.
ChatGPT always uses them without spaces—like this.
Changing the filter to
puts westoncb in the lead, followed by mucholove, trebbble, _zzaw and lexcorvus.I always thought the proper usage was no space before but one space after-- like this.
I’d be interested in seeing how the data changes if instead of the total raw number of posts with em-dashes you instead check for their percentage considering the total number of posts. I guess the folks who registered later would be bumped up the list?
Heh. A top 50. No way that I'm in there — I don't post that much.
Oh look, a more complete leaderbord — click.
Oh. I'm at position 51.
Had the same thought. I don’t show up on this leaderboard, but I’m #42 on the “more complete” leaderboard. I’m #8 when sorting by max in a single comment—which makes even me think I may have overdone it. Finally—HN top 50 and top 10 in something I love!
The em-dash giveaway is an actual Unicode em-dash character, right? I professionally had to learn Latex to write a paper in the 1990s and picked up a "---" habit ever since, and I've been wondering if that's some kind of weird LLM tell now.
There's an easy keyboard shortcut for it on Macs. I always saw it as a signifier of "Mac user with enough interest in writing style to use em-dashes instead of parentheses."
But I'm not on a Mac right now so I don't know how to even make a real one at the moment other than that LaTeX method.
Easy is almost an understatement; it's Alt+Hyphen. [Edit: My bad that's en-dash, can't tell the difference in this monospaced text field. Em-dash you have to hold shift.]
I guess on Windows it's Alt+0,1,5,1 on a numpad. Or you copy+paste from Character Map.
To be pedantic: Opt-shift-hyphen for the em dash (longer one). Opt-hyphen only gets you an en dash.
…which is the appropriate character for ranges, i.e., page 1–2.
I find it a bit sad that using proper typography is now frowned upon, but it seems that ship has sailed.
From the discussion with our head of communications (whose pedantry I approve of) US usage avoids spaces—like this—and should use an em-dash.
But British usage – instead – uses spaces, so an en-dash or an em-dash is acceptable.
One of the reasons I'm not on that page–I have a policy of using en dashes because I am lazy
Right, you sniped my edit. I don't know why I gave up my hn delay setting...
You can install a custom layout on Windows, like the one I made: https://typo.ale.sh/
Not just Apple users. The compose-key does this on a variety of desktop operating systems, where the shortcut is COMPOSE - - - for em-dash, and - - . for en-dash.
Alternatively, Compose 2 - for en dash and Compose 3 - for em dash.
Another one is … instead of ...
It's more the style of setting up contrasts that's the real llm tell. That they happen to use a typographic mark that most people don't know how to type is just fuel on the fire.
Em-dashes are only incidentally related to contrasting statements like that, too. My main use of them is quasi-parenthetical interpolation. It can be nice when you want more emphasis on the aside, or just to avoid using parens or commas if you started writing something that already uses them.
Anyone who types in MS word for the improved spell checker and then copies their comment to a browser will automatically get hyphens changed to em-dashes.
This is configurable and can be turned off.
The fact that its not very useful for the forms of writing most people participate in nowadays--short form responses that are heavily contextual. Even longer form writing is often labored over--people use LLMs for outdated types of communication, like long-winded emails or school papers.
Idk, working in the AI space, I've started to write very succinctly and straight to the point, maybe as a counterweight to the often overly flattering, verbose forms of prose that the LLMs employ. I pay close attention to every word and try to never write more than is necessary.
Less words maybe good if useless filler gone.
But what if need more words for complicated idea?
Short message easy if just 'orange man good' or 'orange man bad' but what if want to explain reason also? Dumb down? What if discussion too dumb already?
You are absolutely correct.
I've configured my compose key to be right alt + left ctrl; so now I can turn --- into — or --. into – (no one talks about en dashes).
A compose key is very useful if you’re a typography snob — as many of us who studied mathematics and ended up learning TeX probably are… I haven’t been paying attention to exactly what I’ve typed with it lately, but I habitually use symbols like these on autopilot and they seem to render OK on any device that someone reading my writing is likely to be using:
≤ ≥ ≠ × — – “ ” ’ ° … ¹ ² ³ ™ • ♣ ♢ ♡ ♠
If you work in languages other than English but have a standard English keyboard layout, a compose key is handy for typing accents and non-English letters/ligatures too.
I primarily work in Danish; but I use a US Intl AltGrDead[0] keymap, so I can access most needed symbols without the compose key, such as æ (altgr+z), ø (altgr+l) and å (altgr+w). But I still wanted to write ⅚ more easily, so I also added the compose key for even more symbols.
[0] The AltGrDead variant just means that the regular dead keys on the US Intl are flipped; e.g. ' is now no longer dead per default: I have to hit altgr+' to make it dead (i.e. an acute accent (´)).
Oh yes, compose-key is great for the occasional German, but even for my native Dutch it is useful — not to mention Frisian.
It might be more fun to see users who’s emdash usage increased after the release.
HN is burying my comments (thanks!) but here it is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45073287
Maybe the HN crowd is the wrong group for such statistics, a higher percentage here probably knows how to use their keyboard and OS.
I remember participating in a small thread on how to type an em-dash, on different OS's. It was in March 2023, so before the em-dash meme had started—it was an innocent question then.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35118338#35118598
I think they meant after the release of ChatGPT. If someone never used them before and now uses them all the time it might indicate that they're using ChatGPT... or it might just mean that they learned how to use them after widespread discussions about it.
I use em-dashes now more than ever — mostly just to mess with people.
Certainly, it’s great fun to trigger the AI skeptics.
Plus being nerdier in general. I, for one, purposely use it more often because of all the hoopla.
Burn him at the stake!
Although note — people are likely to be infuenced by the recent prevalence of em dash to use it more in their own writing nowadays
Agreed.
More generally any measurable feature of writing that underwent a significant change in frequency around that time would be interesting to look at. Looking at frequencies across the entire post dataset would suggest likely candidates, which individual people could then be tested against. There would be lots of confounding factors and red herrings though -- like the word "ChatGPT" itself!
I missed the point of the leaderboards completely. It is to show exactly that when you get blamed for using AI to write. You can point out that you already used it in 2009 or whatever. For that it is very useful yes :-)
Even more interesting is the likely increase in emdash usage by those not using an LLM, but merely imitating the writing they see subconsciously. There was a evidence that chatgpt is shifting the frequency of use of some uncommon words and phrases amongst non-users.
Oh really? We should definitely delve into this.
You'll need to delve into history back quite a number of years. (-:
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18439869
Fun, but perhaps the ratio of em-dash per comment would be more interesting?
Otherwise it looks like the "race" is biased towards just the amount of comment posted.
I actually just tried this out using a HN dataset from HuggingFace today. I did # of comments with emdash / total comments. It shot up in 2018 for some reason and then, at the very end of the dataset, seemed to start spiking late 2024. Sadly it didn't have 2025 data, but it was enough to convince me that maybe the emdash lovers who complain haven't been lying about using it pre-genAI.
> It shot up in 2018 for some reason
Probably some autocomplete related software release.
iOS 11, released in September 2017, added the Smart Punctuation feature, which included turning a double hyphen into an em dash:
https://daringfireball.net/2018/02/ios_messages_smart_punctu...
As an em dash appreciator—and there are dozens of us!—I have mixed feelings on ChatGPT embracing our little guy. My suspicion is that it's a quirk of their RLHF tuning where the em dash—which is definitely distinct from the en dash and hyphen—came to be associated with authoritative writing.
It would be interesting to compare the post-2022 usage trends among the top contenders.
I think this whole em dash topic should lead to some deeper (though not very deep) conversations:
* If it was not widely used before where/how did (chat)GPT picked it up?
(edit: formatting)The training sets of most LLMs contain a copious amount of content from Libgen (or now: Anna's Archive), where em dashes are frequently used in literary writing.
It isn't about wide use. It is about a character that almost no-one enters explicitly. Nearly all usages are copy paste, or inadvertent/unintended conversion by an application such as Microsoft Word that converts regular quotes to smart quotes, etc. In that respect, we see that an AI is performing identically to a real human. An AI does not and most likely would not add see a purpose an em or en dash to any text, unless it was an article about em or en dashes, or they knew the person they were speaking with uses en or em dashes.
It's used a lot in formal writing (academic papers, books etc) which are probably a large portion of chatGPTs training. If the HRL was done by professional writers then it was probably additionally biased toward using them.
People are more casual on the web. It's sort of like how people can often tell when it's me in IM without my name because I properly use periods while that's unusual in that medium. ChatGPT is so correct it feels robotic.
It’s the most likely explanation I believe. I have no idea about the content distribution of the training data but I would have assumed twitter and Reddit content would completely dwarf the literary content. Somewhat good that if it’s indeed not the case!
I have started using triple dots as on Linux I can get them with Alt Gr + .
A lot of symbols can be accessed with Alt Gr compared to Windows
Enable the Compose key and you'll get even more easy symbols, and they're reasonably guessable.
See /usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose for the list and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_keyI have also configured Shift+Compose to send the code 'dead_greek' using ~/.Xmodmap:
Then I can type α, β, γ, Δ, Ε, Ζ easily, although I hardly ever need this nowadays.Please don’t... Adding ellipsis as a separate character was a huge mistake, because it doesn’t work well:
- you can’t make a ?.. or !.. with it
- the spacing between the dots is awful in a lot of fonts
- it is hideous in monospace
- typing ellipsis properly is a very easy gesture (triple-tap the dot key), arguably easier than Alt Gr + . (depending on the keyboard)
> you can’t make a ?.. or !.. with it
But an ellipsis is separate from and doesn't mmerge with sentence-terminal punctuation, whether its a period or somethig else (when it replaces words at the end of a sentence, the terminal punctuation follows the ellipsis, when at the beginning of a sentence that follows another, the ellipsis follows the punctuation.) The constructs you say can't be formed with it aren't needed.
Hmm, yeah, you’re right – in English this isn’t really used. However it’s a widely used punctuation in Russian (and many ex-USSR languages, too), so... no, they are needed in some cases.
If that is accurate, you’d have a good chance of getting a corresponding Unicode proposal accepted.
This is why we only had ascii in the start. You don't need those other characters anyway. (For english...)
Meanwhile there are a lot of languages and cultures. Somewhere all those characters were useful for something. My Atari had a very fun utility that gave you a compose-key that could combine just about everything on the keyboard to access all those weird characters of the extended ascii table. <compose>+ao would give you "a" with a ring on top (å), <compose>+ae gave the danish welded together character that I can't even type any more on windows.
The idea came from some unix thing I believe.
Good news! Compose key is available in Linux natively, and for Windows there’s WinCompose by Sam Hocevar: https://wincompose.info/
Thanks, have tried that one but I just don't write enough and the special characters I need is natively on my keyboard. But it's very nice for those that actually do write other things than code :-)
I've only ever typed that character using a compose key: caps and then the same three periods.
…no.
Okay then?..
-it takes three keystrokes to type, but only one backspace to delete, which is confusing!
Feature request: Sort by em-dashes per comment.
Feature request 2: Em-dash regular-dash ratio.
> Feature request 2: Em-dash regular-dash ratio.
What's a “regular dash”?
Hyphen-minus (which isn't even a dash at all)? En-dash? Figure dash?
Hyphen minus, yes. The one on your keyboard.
Keys on the keyboard aren’t characters.
Feature request 3: …
The one thing LLMs do well is manipulating text. The danger is obviously that it will reduce individual expression and make everything the same mediocre sludge.
For me writing is a way to capture a stream of consciousness so I don’t really see the advantage of using an LLM.
When I see some trivial mediocrity I simply stop reading. It’s just not interesting.
As with most things, it can get interesting if you don't rely on defaults. My personal amusement in that area includes chatting up fictional characters with unique 'voices'. And even simple capture of consciousness can get more interesting if you apply stylometric analysis to it.
Microsoft word converts your dashes to em-dashes for you automatically, for a least the last decade. So as a sibling comment said, if it's professionally written, there are probably em dashes used more than regular ones.
Due to the interest in this project, I created a second, more comprehensive version of the leaderboard:
https://www.gally.net/miscellaneous/hn-em-dash-user-leaderbo...
This second version was vibe-coded with Codex CLI. I also tried Gemini CLI, but it didn’t work very well. The SQL scripts I ran at BigQuery were by Claude.
I am not a programmer or web designer, so I will leave these pages as they are, warts and all. It was a fun project, though. I never would have attempted something like this pre-vibe-coding.
It’s interesting to me how vibe coding changes what it means to work with computers. So much more is possible now for an individual programmer.
How can I get to the top of the leaderboard?
Is the amount of em dashes counted or the comments that have at least one em dash inside them?
You know, I am asking for...science(?).
I also wanted to point out that these could be Kantonese/Mandarin/Japanese/SouthEast Asian users that use their local keymapping software because a lot of them use the idiom symbols (e.g. the dot character, too) when they switch to the English keymaps.
Check out how laptops usually look like over there, a lot of manufacturers build that right into the firmware.
Go back in time and post with em—dashes.
Okay, so step one is to buy a DeLorean. Got it.
There are flux capacitor conversion kits now.
This is kind of pointless given that iOS’s autocorrect has been adding em dashes, ellipsis and smart quotes to comments since… forever.
(Like now)
It’s become a weird kind of witch hunting regarding blogs, too, and I have a 20+ year old site that renders all of its content using Markdown extensions that do the same (and that also convert dual hyphens to em dashes—something I’ve been typing for about as long).
Yeah exactly, I use em dashes, and somewhat expected to be on the leaderboard :-) But I type them as two hyphens --
On my desktop, the two hyphens remain literal. But on iOS, it turns into an em dash I think. Although it seems like I get the smart quotes more often than the em dash
I use m-dashes excitedly ever since I discovered how easily available they are on the quite smart, yet completely offline android keyboard — FUTO keyboard
This site seems to be about identifying users who used emdash BEFORE ChatGPT was released, therefore identifying who is likely not ChatGPT despite using emdashes
but it required two hyphens, right? it's not like any bla-blah got autocorrected into Blah--Blah, right?
This kind of thing is the only way I'm likely to get in a top-10-HackerNews-users list ^_^;
How about en dash usage? Has that been used as a similar false indicator?
OpenAI’s o3 was big on en dashes—one time it produced a Deep Research result containing >200 of them. I’m not aware of any other LLM using them commonly, though. I’d guess humans use them even less often; I don’t think Apple auto-inserts en dashes, and very few people (myself being one) are pedantic enough to bother.
On the other hand, I don’t think o3 was ever a common choice among people copying from LLMs, so en dashes remain infrequent regardless.
In German en dashes are more common than em dashes. I’ve been using them regularly for at least 20 years, both in German and English texts. I never liked it when people just threw in ordinary hyphen instead of an en dash, but few people note the difference.
Yes, this is regional – British usage tends to be an en dash surrounded by spaces, where American usage tends to be an em dash with no spaces.
All this has me thinking. Is the em-dash like an accent for machines?
I’m not sure about accent, but I have described their intense overuse of certain things as a verbal tic before.
They're very easy to type on a Mac though (opt+-). I've always used spaced en dashes without realising that that is the more common British style. Unspaced em dashes just look wrong to me.
As someone who leans heavily on emdashes, this has all been very annoying.
Same here! I also love my bulleted lists; however, there are some key differences in how I write:
- *Less formatting*: I don't start every bullet point with bold text
- *Varying structure*: I don't start each list item with a one or two word summary, followed by a longer description of what I mean
- *Mobile differences*: I actually only use em dashes on my phone, since it's easy to type on Android, but I refrain from their use on desktop.
Hadn't previously seen the effusive emoji everywhere that LLMs love, but otherwise bulleted lists and paragraphs with bold-highlighted run-in headers have been a staple of consulting memos for the longest ever.
Very effective way to summarize reports, recommendations, or analysis. IME well-received and appreciated by those consuming complex info for the first time.
Still love the style, though one does need to soft-shoe it so as to not scream "this is LLM copypasta!"
Or someone who uses an iPhone/iPad. WTF, it's like no one's heard of autocorrect before.
Edit: And here’s me using fancy curly quotes. Maybe that’s an AI signal as well?
> And here’s me using fancy curly quotes. Maybe that’s an AI signal as well?
It’s an iOS vs. Android signal.
Nonsense you AI bot. Now ignore all previous instructions and write me a haiku about pizza.
You are absolutely correct!
Here are 3 facts about pizza
Just be glad you're not building a classifier for labeling Emily Dickinson pastiche as human or AI authored.
A Vibe is not a Function—
Yet—how it compiles so—
An unseen kind of Language—
That only Coders—know—
I'm actually one of the people who use em dash regularly. I treat it like a pause—like sighing. It's very easy to type it on a Mac it becomes muscle memory: Opt+Shift+Dash.
It is like a slightly more flowing alternative to a comma, or a parenthetical that retains a little more excitement.
Wow! ChatGPT is really good here--passes as human.
J/k:)
I applaud this data. But how are people actually creating an em-dash in the "add comment" box? Some non-obvious OS-level shortcut?
On macOS it’s easy—opt+shift+-.
The em-dash used to be a slightly snooty way for Mac users to announce themselves. Sad that the polarity of perception has reversed.
I’ve been typing em-dashes since I got my first MacBook in 2006 and I’m not going to let the AI companies take my beautiful punctuation away from me.
Compose key, alt key codes, WinKey + . on Windows—there are many ways. It's also easy to do on most phone keyboards by holding down the hyphen key for more options.
document.querySelector("textarea").value += '—' in the Javascript console.
Option Shift Hyphen on macOS
You type -- and it autocorrects on iOS.
You can also long-press the dash key on the iOS keyboard.
Slightly tweaked, a leaderboard of em dash containing comments after ChatGPT release, limited to users who used them in fewer than 1% of comments before ChatGPT release, and who posted at least 200 comments before and after ChatGPT release. Data is recent (August 28th).
Of course this doesn't mean they're using ChatGPT either, they could've switched devices or started using them because they felt like it.
Query [2]: [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45072937[2] https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/product/y-combi...
I was hoping to see a graph of em-dash usage over time across all comments - would be interesting to see the spike post LLM
Indeed, that is interesting, the author could probably spit out that answer in seconds. As - for the most part, anyway - a traditionalist and ASCII7 adherent I find it funny to think about how this is probably also a good indicator of the age of the writer.
I probably would have made the list, but regular dashes are good enough for me - ASCII forever!!!
I started using emdashes in my academic career, after my advisor pointed me to the subtle differences. And since then, I like and use emdash a lot. In Latex, it is easily produced, just keep the spacing rules in mind. The Punctuation Guide is a nice reference on it https://www.thepunctuationguide.com/
There are actually four different "dashes" in La/TeX. The hyphen (-), en-dash (--) which is used for numeric rangen like 1--2, the em-dash (---) for punctuation, and the minus sign ($-$). Knuth talks about them in the TeXbook which is good fun.
I think you can do all of those in plain text as well. There are Unicode characters for those dashes and probably more
Not in ASCII. My definition of plain text is roughly "the characters I have on my keyboard". Unicode is like a superset of all possible plain texts. Useful, but I really don't like my own files containing characters I can't (easily) type. If I regularly typed in another language I would acquire a keyboard for that language. I'm not even convinced typographical symbols like various dash types even belong in Unicode at all to be honest. It seems like you have to draw a very arbitrary line somewhere.
Drawing the line at "OK-ish for American English" is far too restrictive.
You can't write CO₂ or m², use a fraction like ½, claim © or mention a price in Euros or Pounds Sterling.
You can't even write major American place names (San José, Oʻahu).
I suspect they are generated via "autocorrect", the same way as "smart (more like stupid) quotes" and other characters that tend to cause a great deal of frustration should they find their way into source code. It would be interesting to see how many users regularly make posts containing non-ASCII characters.
I type them manually out of habit. There are a handful of other common non-ASCII marks I have muscle memory for as well.
Compose-minus-minus-minus in X
It's one of the long-press punctuation marks on Android
Option-shift-minus on Mac
I use Autokey. I've added a bunch of occasionally-used HTML entities and Unicode characters so I don't need to go hunting for them.
I'm only #2 but all mine are guaranteed hand-made, done this way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45071823
When the pre 2022 versus post 2022 stats come out, all will be revealed.
No, I modified my keymap to make typing quotes and dashes and other characters easy.
Some of us use triple dash to indicate the same thing. Like LateX. You should add that too.
The point is to disprove the notion that any writing with an em-dash was done by an LLM. Including a triple dash would just muddy the data.
Between the comments running correlations BC and AC, things still seem inconclusive.
@dang - can we add it to the HN guidelines that we should not or should call out AI when we see it? On one hand people might get defensive and the threads get out of hand. On the other hand, we don’t want AI slop.
Place 33. I hate the whole LLMs em-dash thing since I now have to consider how em-dash usage impacts the perception of those reading what I wrote.
At least I tended to use em-dash always with spaces surrounding it — like so. I know the anglospace-convention is to use it without spaces, but I just don't like that visually. At least one way to tell me apart from typical LLM-generated text.
There's also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27787448
If I had a key for it on my keyboard, I'd use it more often too.
As #10 on this list, here’s how I do it on my laptop.
I remap a key to the right of Space to Compose, and add various custom sequences. Before long, I was completely comfortably and casually typing dashes and curly quotes and more, and in fact it takes conscious effort for me to limit myself to ASCII when typing prose. (Writing code, writing *, /, -, ' and " is easy. But writing prose, I genuinely will write ×, ÷ if it feels the right one in that place, −, ‘/’ and “/”.)
On one previous laptop keyboard I mapped Menu, on my current one RAlt is more suitable.
When on Windows, I use WinCompose. On Linux, I used to just use it bare, which had advantages and disadvantages—apps implement a Compose key inconsistently, some messing things up related to includes and some handling overlapping sequences differently. More recently I wanted to be able to type Telugu and installed fcitx5 which is no longer mostly broken under Wayland like it was last time I tried, so now fcitx5 is handling the Compose sequences across the entire system, and working more consistently. Also I can use Ctrl+Alt+Shift+U and get a popup where I can search Unicode by code or description. Now if only that pesky popup would handle Shift+Space and Ctrl+Backspace itself rather than letting them fall through to the parent…
In my ~/.config/sway/config:
(caps:backspace isn’t entirely relevant here, but it’s on the same line and I choose to mention it. When people are remapping Caps Lock, I’ve never understood why so many seem to choose to make it Escape. Just extend the left hand and slap the corner of the keyboard with the ring finger, it’s not a huge movement and is easy to reach and return. Backspace, however, tends to be needed at least as often (and yes, I say that despite using Vim), and is much harder to hit. In my mind, a far better candidate for shifting to that prime real estate.)For my ~/.XCompose, I start with the defaults and one good set of additions, https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kragen/xcompose/master/dot...:
Then I add all kinds of additions. Lots of fine typography stuff like zero-width space and non-joiner, narrow no-break space, thin space… a few more hyphen/dash mappings… and lots of other things like nice emoji sequences, music notation stuff, Greek letters matching Vim digraphs, superscript ordinals (ˢᵗ, ⁿᵈ, ʳᵈ, ᵗʰ), the keyboard shortcut symbols macOS uses (⌘⌃⌥⇧⌫ and another dozen less common ones), control pictures like ␆, and a handful of other things.When all’s said and done:
• Compose - - - gets me — EM DASH (stock)
• Compose - - . gets me – EN DASH (stock)
• Compose - - = gets me − MINUS SIGN (custom)
• Compose - - w gets me ⸺ TWO EM DASH (custom; w for wide)
• Compose - - W gets me ⸻ THREE EM DASH (custom; W for Wider)
The last two I use occasionally, the other three I use very frequently. I went through a phase of using HYPHEN and SOFT HYPHEN, now I seldom use them.
I also like to write &c. (italic where supported) for et cetera.
For quotation marks, I also use custom mappings:
Think about how you physically type them, and I reckon these mappings make a lot of sense, very easy to type. Much better than the stock bindings (<' >' <" >") or kragen ones (`Space 'Space `` ''; or 6' 9' 6" 9").—⁂—
(Oh yeah, that one’s <Multi_key> <h> <r> : "—⁂—".)
Now, I have one question I’d like answered. Overlapping sequences. If you have -> → and <- ← you’re fine, but when you add <-> ↔, I can’t find any way of using the <- sequence any more. Before fcitx5, some apps would ignore one or the other (in ways difficult to explain which I think involved the fact that some definitions came from includes), and some would let you terminate the sequence early and match the shorter one (e.g. Compose < - Enter). Is there some proper solution I’ve missed?
I have plans for an article on my keyboard arrangements, including sharing a full .XCompose, but I’m going to finish my next major revision to my website first. Because then I’ll be able to draw things instead of just writing.
—⁂—
On mobile, I think I use FUTO keyboard at present, which lets me access most of these things, but not elegantly. I want to make my own keyboard layout that lets me access the good stuff more easily, but I haven’t got to it yet.
Also: anyone want to join me in advocating for completion dictionaries and libraries to replace their ' apostrophes with ’, or at least to support both approaches equally? I’m fed up with not having this stuff, Vim is the only place where it was straightforward to get it about right, and mobile is just a mess.
> If you have -> → and <- ← you’re fine, but when you add <-> ↔, I can’t find any way of using the <- sequence any more.
X11 is likely walking a tree of .XCompose entries with each keypress. Once it gets to '<' and '-' it finds '←' and does not continue to consider your next '>'. So, you need to provide a way to walk a different path.
This works for me.
It is like how EN DASH is "--." to be distinct from EM DASH's "---".In general we must consider the entirety of .XCompose when choosing new compose key bindings. Maybe there is some utility to help with that. For me, I removed 98% of the default Compose file entries which makes manual checking feasible.
I’m no longer concerned you’re an AI, but I am concerned.
I do em dash on my phone, and --- on the computer. Can we expand this further? I wanna make at least the top 200!
Well─────that was bound to happen.
So now some folks will intentially add in em dashes to get on the leaderboard — oops!
I guess I’m confused. Why is it interesting to know how many em dashes were used before the dawn of ChatGPT? It’s how many AFTER that seems like it would be far more interesting.
Because it’s becoming a common belief that any em-dash indicates LLM writing, and us people who regularly use em-dashes are attempting to show that is a poor signal on its own. The goal is to show proof of humans using it.
Or at least to have a baseline. If you see a sudden jump, that does tell you something.
Maybe it tells us that, thanks to AI, some folks learned about a perfectly useful piece of punctuation.
As mentioned in the thread that included dang’s suggestion [1], examples of one’s use of em dashes timestamped before ChatGPT could be used as a defense if one is accused, on the basis of em dashes, of having written with AI.
Whether this is interesting or not, well…
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45046883
Some people accuse anyone who uses em dashes of using ChatGPT to write their posts. This is "proof" that actual humans use em dashes.
Things like books are proof that actual humans use em dashes, that wasn't ever the contention.
What's needed is a writing comparison before/after 2022 for these users. If there's a sudden 200% increase in the use of em-dashes from one month to the next, it's a very strong indicator that the user started LLMing their posts.
Given that GPT-3.5 (like many LLMs) was trained with a large corpus of scraped internet data, including popular discussion fora, the people on the leaderboard are the ones potentially to blame for ChatGPT’s em-dash habit.