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this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2026
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Honestly this is one of the biggest issues with it all that you don't really see talked about much
Artists sink a load of time into a piece of art they are proud of, and because AI has got to the point now it's not always obvious at first glance to average Joe, so people rely on heuristics to spot it instead.
For this artist apparently it's "yellows"
For anyone who takes photos (or even video now) even half seriously, photos with Bokeh and good lighting get called out now
You like making instrumental electronic or sampled music? Get ready for everything to be called AI
Even writing: I always used to like using em dashes—they're a pretty versatile piece of punctuation for any casual speech style of writing. If you use an em dash now though, someone just assumes the text is AI. So I've generally just stopped; not because I want to, because AI and people (somewhat understandably) not having a better way to identify AI writing.
Hell, I made an excel sheet the other day to work some stuff out and someone asked how I got the AI to do it.....
Now I'm not saying it's everyone, but I'm seeing a group of people forming, who basically say anything they can't immediately understand how to do themselves must be AI. I have a suspicion it's the same demographic that would say "well I could do that" in a modern art museum or "all they do is press play" when looking at any kind of electronic music production.
uhh from my experience, any piece of art of sufficient quality will be accused of being AI made these days.
I agree.
To many times I have to post this meme because someone yet again thinks everything they see is AI. Even if the original picture is like 10 years old. Especially apparent in the "Fuck AI" community.
I had completely forgotten that show existed.
With photography it's also a grey area. I'm a professional underwater photographer. I've got thousands of dollars of specialized housings, lighting, wet lenses, etc, but the color is still wrong because water. Meanwhile some open water student swam by 40 minutes ago and made the whole area hazy.
So for decades I've done various degrees of touch up and and color grading because what you see with your eyes looks nothing like what comes out of the camera because human eyes and brains do a lot of processing that camera sensors don't.
And then there's generative stuff that I don't think impact the art of photography. If someone uses generative noise reduction I don't think that's a problem. The non-generative solution to that is spending an extra 10 grand on a better camera and lens, so it's not as much of a skill issue as a money one. I'm absolutely fine with people using generative tools for that stuff.
So where's the border between acceptable and unacceptable post-processing? There's clearly bad stuff like wholesale fakes and such, but I don't know if we have a clear line.
Smartphone cameras are almost certainly the largest source of photography in society today, and those things default to doing all kinds of automatic processing on the images they take.
If it gives you any consolation, I’m also a fan of em dashes and don’t assume LLM output when seeing them. But there are other telltale signs of LLM writing. At least when the LLM is not instructed to hide those maybe?
The “default” LLM style is so grating to me, in a condescending corpospeak kind of way.
After several years of Word automatically changing a dash between two words to a wider dash (maybe not the same type as emdash?) it's weird to see those same dashes becoming a tell of inauthentic.
When are we going to see the AI using two spaces after a full stop to try and pretend that it types like someone more than 50 years old?
You’re absolutely right! Let’s see if we can find better ways to determine if something is AI-generated:
One thing that always makes me think something is AI written is the repeated use of sentences like "It's not X, its Y".
I use that so much I just assumed AI got it from me
AI writes like a hybrid of an opinion article journalist and a know-it-all redditor.
It's very common on journalism.
Circling back to the point of this post though, genAI learnt that from real people's writing first.
And if they are training for it at all, genAI will eventually get better at not being seen as AI than real people.
I'm currently writing a book and I'm terrified of using EM dashes, even where they would be perfectly applicable. I always end up restructuring the sentences to avoid it. The only instance i keep it is for dialogoue interruptions like:
"I bend over and spread my—"
Just use them regardless. A lot of sloppers realized they can ask the slop making machines to leave them out. I even seen stuff when they added random typos to fool some people.
I've dropped most formatting, now I have to drop spellcheck to not be routinely accused of being a bot?
"—cheeks."
People who read books are a different breed. I wouldn't worry about them.
But if we're going to make a lazy heuristical stand against AI, I've always enjoyed the liberal use of semi-colons.
I think what makes the em dash seem AI-like is... there isnt an em dash button on the keyboard.
So typically the only way those show up is when markdown-to-blog-post tools convert normal dashes into stylized em dashes as a transpiling process.
Stuff like hugo and etc largely do this automatically.
So if a poster uses an em dash out of that context, it right away throws up a red flag cuz... howd you do that easily?
Did you memorize the alt code to make one?
As someone who uses a phone — you just hold a minus until it allows you to input dashes. Also, when I used windows I had it memorized, on Linux it doesn't always work, but should be Ctrl+U 2014, on Mac it's just minus with modifier buttons pressed
It's not hard to input that if you want to
It depends on the keyboard, and the software. I'm using HeliBoard on my phone right now, and all I have to do to make an em dash is hold the dash key—that's it. It's actually quite trivial to add em dashes in various cases, and I wish folks wouldn't pretend otherwise.
I also make use of other characters, like my beloved interrobang. I actually have that pinned to my clipboard, so I can paste it when it's appropriate.
"You care about writing enough to use special characters‽"
"Yes."
But if you're writing something significant, you're probably using a text editor, and many of them will automatically replace the en dash when the em dash when the are spaces on either side.
Fun fact: on some keyboard layouts you can access the em dash easly
This is the most common Italian layout
You can see that you just need to press control+hyphen
The marking above the hyphen there is an underscore
it's telling you that hitting shift-hyphen will give you an underscore.
You may be using software that supports inserting an em-dash when you hit that combination, but I don't believe that it's the keyboard layout that dictates that.
searches
It sounds like Microsoft Word does something similar:
https://www.avantixlearning.ca/microsoft-word/how-to-insert-an-em-dash-or-en-dash-in-a-word-document-4-ways/
Yes, if you use shift it will give you an underscore but with control (or alt gr) it will give an em dash, should be a thing on Windows and i belive KDE
Or it could be that the keyboard that i use is just like ts but i doubt
If you use the compose key, you don't have to memorize the unicode value. You just press
compose ---.if you use lemmy, type
a -- bto get "a -- b".With that you made an en-dash, not an em-dash.
Let's see if it does anything if you use three a
b vs two a -- b ?
Edit: Yep looks like that's it.
Interestingly, in my client both show up as separate dashes. I suspect it's simply a ligature in the font used in your frontend.
E: Hm, no that is not it, copy-pasting the text from the web frontend copies the em- an en-dashes, so it's actually replacing the characters during rendering.
I use a the Compose key (Compose hyphen hyphen hyphen) or emacs (C-x 8 _ m) on Linux, and on Android, my soft keyboard supports holding hyphen to insert one.
And the Lemmy Web UI converts a triple hyphen to an em-dash.
i gotta be honest, before it became a big talking point with AI, i didn't realize em dashes, en dashes, and dashes were different characters, just different grammatical functions of the same character. i figured fancy word processors made them longer to make them distinct from minus signs, but that was it!
If you go through Unicode, there are a bunch of hyphen-like characters. In many typefaces, some may appear identical.
searches
EDIT: That's not an exhaustive list, either. Off-the-cuff, I can also think of the line-drawing characters, which also have a horizontal line.
I'll be honest, I was this moment-old when I released that too, thanks to reading this comment. I, also, assumed they were just different stylisations of the same thing.
On KDE, the default keyboard layout makes it pretty easy to type the various dashes and quotation marks, so that's one way. Ever since discovering that, I've been making a conscious effort to use them (because I am the type of person who likes doing the typograhically correct thing, even in an informal context… maybe that's the problem, actually). Haven't been called out as “AI” yet, but it's probably going to happen at some point.
Same on GNOME, em-dash is RightAlt-- on my layout
It's one click away on my android keyboard.
let me -- try something
yep, lemmy can do it.
Weird — I just see a double dash
Yep, client-side rendering.
The Lemmy Web UI converts a double hyphen to an en-dash and a triple to an em-dash when displaying text. However, not all clients do this. I'm viewing this in Eternity, and it leaves the hyphens intact.
This conversion happens when viewing the comment, rather than writing it.
On a Mac it’s shift + option + dash. Just option + dash for an en dash.
Mac has always been opt+shift+hyphen
Honestly for old versions of windows yes, you had to learn the arcane alt+0151, but I was already used to that for typing in french on a British keyboard. It's now more like Mac with win+shift+hyphen
Android and IPhone, you just hold on the hyphen to get to them
And many word processors (and Linux via compose) turn a triple hyphen into one
The em dash is just one of the signs that usually (if you use more rhan 1 braincell) does not in itself signal AI. For me at least I need more than just them to identify something as AI, it's the way they phrase stuff and use typical AI sentence structures.