Em dashes

Apparently, the use of em dashes (these: —) in text is now taken as an indication that the text was written by AI. That's unfortunate. I use em dashes all over the place in my writing, as well as en dashes (–), ellipses (…), colons (:), semicolons (;), and curly quotes (“”). My blogging platform automatically replaces straight quotes with curly quotes, but I type the rest manually using Ctrl + Shift + U on Linux (e.g., Ctrl + Shift + U <Release all> 2014<Enter> for em dashes) or the special characters keyboard on my phone. I even use em dashes the way AI does: without surrounding spaces. That's how it was recommended in some style guide I consulted.

However, I don't use AI to write text on this blog. I've been using em dashes and en dashes ever since I was introduced to them by Saga Söderback, and the rest are just useful; I even used some in this post!

I'm sure AI companies have indexed my blog, so in some very, very small way, I suppose the opposite is true: AI uses em dashes partly because I do.

#Life #Tech