Which would matter but the entry box in no major browser do was this.

The HN text area does not insert em-dashes for you and never has. On my phone keyboard it's a very lot deliberate action to add one (symbol mode, long press hyphen, slide my finger over to em-dash).

The entire point is it's contextual - emdashes where no accomodations make them likely.

For now. A year ago they weren't even Gen AI videos. Give it a few months...

Well, its probably lower false positive than en-dash but higher false negative, especially since AI generated video, even when it has audio, may not have AI generated audio. (Generation conditioned on a text prompt, starting image, and audio track is among the common modes for AI video generation.)

With the right context both are pretty good actually.

I think the emoji one is most pronounced in bullet point lists. AI loves to add an emoji to bullet points. I guess they got it from lists in hip GitHub projects.

The other one is not as strong but if the "not X but Y" is somewhat nonsensical or unnecessary this is very strong indicator it's AI.

Similarly: "The indication for machine-generated text isn't symbolic. It's structural." I always liked this writing device, but I've seen people label it artificial.

Em-dashes are completely innocent. “Not X but Y” is some lame rhetorical device, I’m glad it is catching strays.

When I see emojis in code, especially log statements, it is 100% giveaway AI was involved. Worse, it is an indicator the developer was lazy and didn't even try to clean up the most basic slop.

If nobody used em-dashes, they wouldn’t have featured heavily in the training set for LLMs. It is used somewhat rarely (so e people use it a lot, others not at all) in informal digital prose, but that’s not the same as being entirely unused generally.

Microsoft Word automatically converts dashes to em dashes as soon as you hit space at the end of the next word after the dash.

I do—all the time. Why not?

I also use en dashes when referring to number ranges, e.g., 1–9

Except for Emily Dickenson, who is an outlier and should not be counted.

Seriously, she used dashes all the time. Here is a direct copy and paste of the first two stanzas of her poem "Because I count not stop for Death" from the first source I found, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47652/because-i-could...

  Because I could not stop for Death –
  He kindly stopped for me –
  The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
  And Immortality.

  We slowly drove – He knew no haste
  And I had put away
  My labor and my leisure too,
  For His Civility –

Her dashes have been rendered as en dashes in this particular case rather than em dashes, but unless you're a typography enthusiast you might not notice the difference (I certainly didn't and thought they were em dashes at first). I would bet if I hunted I would find some places where her poems have been transcribed with em dashes. (It's what I would have typed if I were transcribing them).

When I type in English and needs an em dash, I simply switch to the Chinese IME.

Except for highly literate people, and people who care about typography.

Think about it— the robots didn’t invent the em-dash. They’re copying it from somewhere.

Tell me you never worked with LaTeX and an university style guide without telling me you never worked with LaTeX and an university style guide.