@amin Reading articles written by AI can be interesting — spotting AI articles can be fun for some people.
It's not just that they sound robotic or remove all personal associations, there's lots of other ways to tell such as:

• use of em-dashes (often overuse of them)
• use of "It's not just", "not only" sentence structures
• lists of three

(This post was written by a human, in an attempt at satire in the tone of AI)

P.S. I agree. I'd always prefer to read an article full of poor spelling and grammar than a dull and robotic supposed fact dump

@amin i recently pointed out to one of my clients that an article they had "written" and put in their newsletter was clearly written by AI

It contained 14 em-dashes. Don't get me wrong, em-dashes have a purpose, but when they said "no I typed them" I responded, "OK, type me an em-dash now on your keyboard"
Long story short, they couldn't.

@thedoctor my understanding is it can be used similar to how we sometimes use a comma today to put a sort of footnote in the middle of a sentence.

@amin made a great example when pointing out I used an em-dash in my first post

It was used a lot in history, just not so much these days. If AI is good for one thing though, it's for bringing the em-dash back

@thedoctor @paul

Yep. Hyphens (-) and en dashes (–) are used specifically to connect words into a compound word. "His light-headed friend" for example, combines "light" and "headed" into one compound adjective to describe friend (I recently learned this isn't necessary if the compound adjective is the object: "His friend is light headed").

An en dash would be either used to connect ranges of numbers/dates ("1990–1991", "Jan–Feb") or in cases where one half of the compound word is itself two words (I'm often in this situation but I'm having trouble thinking of an example), but in both cases people usually just use a hyphen instead and no one cares.

This article does a great job explaining it all with examples: https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/em-dash-en-dash-how-to-use

@thedoctor @paul

Perfectly fine. Don't use hyphens for em dashes, though. ;)

Two hyphens is the minimum I will accept in the place of an em dash—at least that's common enough due to people not knowing how to type the real thing. One hyphen is just completely wrong. XD

@amin @thedoctor @paul

Wow, I was thinking we don't use emdashes in norwegian, until I found this page,

So I learned somethinng new today, it's what we call "Thought dash" in Norwegian (tankestrek) it's used some times on both sides of a thought, the same way that one uses commas, so I'm not quite sure why there is this additional thing for it.

It's like you said for English also used for the extremeties of ranges, and for values, where it replaces 0 øre (kind of the Norwegian equivalent of cents) so if something costs 10,00 kr you would just replace it with 10,--

https://sprakradet.no/godt-og-korrekt-sprak/rettskriving-og-grammatikk/tegn/tankestrek/

@sotolf @thedoctor @paul

So I learned somethinng new today, it's what we call "Thought dash" in Norwegian (tankestrek) it's used some times on both sides of a thought, the same way that one uses commas, so I'm not quite sure why there is this additional thing for it.

Yes! Em dashes can often be used in the same place commas would be, for parenthetical information.

I would find it clearer than commas when the sentence already has commas in it for other reasons—it helps avoid getting the two mixed up. Em dashes also tend to provide more emphasis around the phrase/clause than commas do.

It's like you said for English also used for the extremeties of ranges, and for values, where it replaces 0 øre (kind of the Norwegian equivalent of cents) so if something costs 10,00 kr you would just replace it with 10,--

Em dashes can be used to replace omitted characters like that (usually two em dashes back to back), but it's a more historical use and I don't see that today. Where I've seen it used like that is books where a character or place name is written like "M——" to for whatever reason avoid writing out the whole thing.

@sotolf @thedoctor @paul

Those look like hyphens, not em dashes, though? Or it could be you're just typing it that way. :)

And yeah, iirc I think something like /- was often written in India for rupees… (I could be a bit off).

₹ is the actual character for rupees.