Blade Runners of LinkedIn Are Hunting for Replicants – One Em Dash at a Time

hubie writes:

People think the em dash is a dead giveaway you used AI - are they right?

ChatGPT is rapidly changing how we write, how we work - and maybe even how we think. So it makes sense that it stirs up strong emotions and triggers an instinct to figure out what's real and what's not.

But on LinkedIn, the hunt for AI-generated content has gone full Voight-Kampff. According to some, there's now a surefire way to spot ChatGPT use: the em dash.

Yes, the punctuation mark officially defined by the width of one "em." A favorite of James Joyce, Stephen King, and Emily Dickinson. A piece of punctuation that's been around since at least the 1830s. So why is it suddenly suspicious? Is it really an AI tell or punctuation paranoia?

Rebecca Harper, Head of Content Marketing at auditing compliance platform ISMS.online, doesn't think so: "I find the idea that it's some kind of AI tell ridiculous. If we start policing good grammar out of fear of AI, we're only making human writing worse!"

She's right. The em dash isn't some fringe punctuation mark. Sure, it's used less often than its siblings - the en dash and the humble hyphen - and it's more common in the US than the UK. But that doesn't make it automatically suspicious.

Robert Andrews, a Senior Editor, explains that this is a difference in style rather than a smoking gun: "It's not just a marker of AI, but of US English and AP Style. It's quite alien to UK journalism training and style, at least my own, albeit long ago. But increasingly encountered in AP Style environments - (or -, or -) unsurprising that this would flow into LLMs."

[...] Still, because it's slightly less common in some circles, people have latched onto it as a tell. Chris McNabb, Chief Technology Officer at eGroup Communications, makes this case: "I think it's a strong indicator, especially when you see it being used often by one person. Typically most people aren't going to long press the dash key to even use the en dash BUT AI such as ChatGPT uses it by default in a lot of cases. So yes when you do see an em dash particularly more than one in a message it's a pretty safe bet for a majority of posts."

Read more of this story at SoylentNews.