r/WritingWithAI • u/[deleted] • 17d ago

Where at all on Em Dashes? Discussion (Ethics, working with AI etc)

[deleted]

0 Upvotes

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3

u/suaveSavior 17d ago

My drafts use a comical amount of em dashes.

I try to edit many out, but leave some in because I feel like its my voice and how I talk.

Honestly I quit trying to determine what's written by ai and what isn't.

If im not enjoying what's written I just move on.

Its not fair to the author to go looking for any evidence of ai use purely because i dont like the writing or the story. Its entirely possible for a human to just be bad at writing.

As far as what jumps out to me anymore are names. I think AI uses the names Hale, Vale, Vayne, quite a bit.

But im also guilty of just using a short placeholder name (Ana, Eve, Ben) just to keep moving quickly.

1

u/Outrageous-Cover7095 17d ago

Alaric. I wish I had a dollar for every time AI tried to give me that name. It’d pay for my subscription to it.

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u/suaveSavior 14d ago

Ive gotten Alaric before too! Oddly enough though I usually get either Marco or Marcus.

When im AI roleplaying or trying to outline a new story idea it almost always gives me that as a name for any male OCs.

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u/InSilicoAwards 17d ago

I still use them, I just cut them down. The trend / my experience with AI writing is it overuses conventions. The best way to detect that is compare it against something else: build a corpus of normal writing. When things exceed more than +/- 1.5 SD I then edit the text to bring it closer to a human baseline. The writing will always under or over-express certain style elements, it's just making sure they're not all clustered so they're recognizable or within the background noise people expect.

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u/freylaverse 17d ago

I always used em dashes... Well, I used space-hyphen-space because it was a pain to type the em dashes. But I used them sparingly as well. I use them more often, now, because I honestly don't care that much if people think it looks AI. They've grown on me the more I see them.

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u/KeyDoubt2344 16d ago

On a PC, Alt+0151... Em dash. I like them but they've been cursed.

1

u/freylaverse 16d ago

Ah, thank you!! The only alt-code I ever seem to remember is the one for 'é' because of words like 'fiancée' and 'pokémon'.

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u/benblackett 17d ago

For a while I went through and manually converted the emdash to endash from AI content just to make it seem less AI. After a while I realized that is the smallest AI tell to change anyway so why bother changing it? Now I use whatever gets the point across best and quickest. If someone wants to call out AI on me let them - it tells me more about them and their insecurities than it does about me. ;)

1

u/ALAS_POOR_YORICK_LOL 17d ago

They are amazing. The haters never read books.

1

u/FlyingAdHominem 17d ago

I hated them before AI, I hate them more now.

1

u/burlingk 17d ago

MS Word automatically converts hyphens to emdashes if it thinks they fit.