Em Dash in Reddit Comments, Interactive

by jonatron • 7 months ago

3 9 7 months ago

astahlx• 7 months ago

Using em dash is just fine. Academic writing teached me using it. However, I have to admit that use of AI is accelerating its „adoption“.

nomilk2• 7 months ago

tl;dr: The proportion of Reddit comments containing emdashes more than doubled since ChatGPT's release!

From the data: for several years before ChatGPT release, the proportion of Reddit comments containing emdashes was about 0.13-0.17%. For the few years after ChatGPT came out, it's between 0.17% and 0.41%.

jonatron3• 7 months ago

Click the % button in the top right

nomilk2• 7 months ago

I noticed it shortly after commenting, and completely rewrote my comment accordingly. Excellent research! If you were to do a write-up on how you did this analysis, that would be very interesting (as the number of comments involved is large).

xnorswap• 7 months ago

There is a sudden jump in late 2017.

A very sudden jump that doesn't further grow.

Browser or mobile OS keyboard change?

jonatron3• 7 months ago

From iOS 11 it auto-corrects -- to — https://glog.glennf.com/blog/2017/7/6/dash-dash-it-all

carlos-menezes• 7 months ago

From my blog[0]: "I instinctively type alt + 0151 (Windows) or option + shift + - (Mac). I don’t use it everywhere (e.g., code comments), but I often employ it in my writing—a habit I developed after years of roleplaying in online games with native English speakers.

An "advanced, trusted GPT-4, ChatGPT and AI Detector tool" flagged the text above as 100% "AI GPT". If I swap the em-dash for a hyphen, it drops to 48%.

The em-dash is a stylistic choice that's been around since the 1830s–used to create a break in a sentence.

I don’t know why this particular style of writing is flagged as AI-generated—as if real humans can’t pause for dramatic effect. We're left second-guessing our own voice and swapping out em-dashes for clunky commas—just to prove we're real.

If that makes me sound like a bot—so be it."

[0] https://www.carlos-menezes.com/em-dash-1830-invention/

Em Dash in Reddit Comments, Interactive

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