The Programmer Identity Crisis

I'm seeing this reaction a lot from younger people (say, roughly under 25). And it's a shame this new suspicion has now translated into a prohibition on the use of dashes.

It's comical too because the only reason AI uses emdashes is because it was so common before AI.

I use three hyphens. In my case, I picked it up from Knuth's TeX many years ago; it's a lexical notation which typesets to a proper em dash.

Three hyphens---it looks good! When I use three hyphens, it's like I dropped three fast rounds out of a magazine. It demands attention.

It's utterly uncommon in the kind of casual writing for which people are using AI, that's why it got noticed. Social media posts, blogs, ...

AI almost certainly picked it up mainly from typeset documents, like PDF papers.

It's also possible that some models have a tokenizing rule for recognizing faked-out em-dashes made of hyphens and turning them into real em-dash tokens.

Maybe because the em dash is not on the keyboard of most people? It is not about the dash, but about the long em dash.

Not uncommon even on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45071722

On my own (long abandoned) blog, about 20% of (public) posts seem to contain an em dash: https://shreevatsa.wordpress.com/?s=%E2%80%94 (going by 4 pages of search results for the em dash vs 21 pages in total).

It's very easy to type on macOS, not to mention auto-substitution that many apps have (and these days this extends to web browsers).