The Programmer Identity Crisis

What's sillier is people associating em-dashes with AI slop specifically because they are unsophisticated enough never to have learned how to use them as part of their writing, and assuming everyone else must be as poor of a writer as they are.

It's the literary equivalent of thinking someone must be a "hacker" because they have a Bash terminal open.

You're overthinking it. LLMs exploded the prevalence of em-dashes. That doesn't mean you should assume any instance of an em-dash means LLM content, but it's a reasonable heuristic at the moment.

> That doesn't mean you should assume any instance of an em-dash means LLM content

No, it doesn't. But people are putting that out there, people are getting accused of using AI because they know how to use em dashes properly, and this is dumb.

> but it's a reasonable heuristic

I dunno, I feel like the base rate fallacy [0] could easily become a factor... Especially if we don't even have an idea what the false-positive or false-negative rates are yet, let alone true prevalence.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy

It doesn't really matter. Before LLM's, they were relatively rarely seen, after LLM's, they are commonly seen in AI-written text. Its not unreasonable for people to associate them with being AI-written.

They weren't "relatively rarely seen". If you have seen a Word document, chances are good that it had em-dashes in it simply because it would often autocorrect to that. In the Apple ecosystem, this sort of autocorrect is provided by the OS itself, so it extends to a lot more content produced.

I'm pretty sure that all the comments about how it was "rarely seen" are because people weren't paying attention to them before in the way they do now.

In any case, to dismiss something as AI slap based solely on this one thing is both lazy and rude, and should be treated as such.