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art of the deal
(quokk.au)
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this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2026
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I wanna know where to buy this guy's keyboard, it must be really rare to have an em-dash key on it.
Fuckin' em-dash, it'll get you every time.
You do understand people who write for a living have been using em dashes for longer than AI, yes?
And you don’t need a fancy keyboard to press a few keys to bring up any Unicode character.
People suspecting AI based on the flimsiest logic is getting so fucking tiring with how frequently they are wrong.
Hear fucking hear. AI can pry the em dash from my fucking cold dead hands. Alt-0151 for life. And Alt-0150, too, when the en dash is more appropriate than a hyphen.
The best test for AI isn't good grammar. It's presenting relatively simplistic ideas in an overly flowery manner; repeating the same idea not in ways that help build an argument, but which are repeating the same idea in different words despite structurally seeming as though they're presenting entirely new points; and other structural problems with the text.
yeah the em dash thing is absolute moron bait
like wow mate, you saw a long dash. call the fucking lab. some people are just punctuation goblins and have been since long before the slop machines turned up
The beauty of this technique is that false positives just means that it was low quality, corporate speak content.
Ha! I love it! Nothing lost either way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing
Like where did the LLMs learn to use the em dash if not from writers using it?
Not only that, but some popular programs, like MS Word, will autocorrect for the em dash.
You do understand that most people don't write for a living, and don't use the em-dash? You do understand that as a result the em-dash isn't part of normal human communication and so sticks out like a sore thumb when it does get used?
I'll also point out that I didn't accuse them of using AI to write this. I use AI myself, frequently. "It'll get you" also refers to what you're assuming (probably my fault, I'm sure I could have been clearer) happened here - if it's not AI, people will assume it is. Because it'll get you every fucking time.
Qasim Rashad is not most people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qasim_Rashid
And if you didn’t mean to say they were using AI and were only commenting on how it might, that’s fair. But people need to understand it’s got a long history and is used by journalists.
I've literally been using em-dashes my entire life — long before genAI was even a thing.
LibreOffice autocorrects two dashes to em dashes once you finish typing the word that comes after it, I think. Same for iPhone. No special keyboard necessary.
Option-Shift-Dash on macOS if you were curious.
I haven't had a Mac in like 8 years, but I honestly miss its keyboard. All the option key shortcuts are amazing. Many of them extremely intuitive, like en dash being option-hyphen and em dash being option-shift-hyphen, or "not equal to" being option-=. And how easy it makes accents was so great. option-e + for acute, option-i for circumflex, u for umlaut, and backtick for grave. All so easy to remember that I still know it despite not having used it this whole decade.
On my android keyboard, I can just long press the hyphen key to get an em-dash — despite it's associations with AI, people can pry my em-dash from my cold, dead hands
I just longpress my dash key ‐ to — or even an N-dash – on my phone ‐ – —
On a keyboard, it's an alt-combo that I can never remember, but if I typed more on a keyboard, I would
PowerToys has a nifty thing for special characters kind of like what you'd do on a phone/tablet by long pressing, makes it pretty easy to access things like — without an alleged dedicated key
You can make em-dash — look.
I do compose
when on my desktop to get one, personally. I mostly use them for sentence cut offs though