I'm excited for the AI wildfire to come and engulf these AI-written thinkpieces. At this point I'd prefer a set of bullet points over having to sift through more "it's not X (emdash) it's Y" pestilence.
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No, no, no! Stop that! The em dash is an wonderful little punctuation mark that's damned useful when used with purpose. You can't turn it into some scarlet glyph just because normal people finally noticed they exist. LLMs use them because we used them, damn it.
For god's sake, are we supposed to go back to the dark ages of the double hyphen like typographic barbarians in the hopes that a future update won't ruin that, too? After all the work to get text editors to automatically substitute them in the first place?
What's funny is that, when people first started noticing that LLMs tended to like the em dash, I'd mentioned to a friend that I hoped—rather naively—it might lead to a resurgence and people would think to themselves "huh, that looks pretty useful." Needless to say, I got that one wrong. Are we really going to sacrifice the poor em dash just because people can't come up with a better signifier for LLM text?