How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-)

AFAIK most computer keyboards don't have em dashes. Rather than hit ALT+0151 every time, I've always just strung along two hyphens, like: --

Absolutely proper and correct use of em dashes, en dashes, and hyphens is, to me, the most obvious tell of the LLM writer. In fact, I think that you can use it to date internet writing in general. For it seems to me that real em dashes were uncommon pre-2022.

Automatic conversions have been happening for a long time. In fact, a few years ago there was some combination of settings on my terminal locale settings and man (well, troff/groff most likely) was converting hyphens in param definitions to some sort of dash character, meaning I couldn't copy and paste out of the man page. I think it also affected perldoc for the same reason.

I don't doubt there are publishing platforms that do it automatically as well, so I wouldn't count on seeing them as an indicator of generated output, even if it may be processed in some manner.