Fuck AI

The hole "topic is just not doing x - it's doing y" is a dead giveaway of using an LLM.

We hardly even ever em dashes in normal writing, so who knows where LLMs picked up the tendency. Hyphen's sure, but em dashes?

I have a 1940s cookbook that has a lot of them in but they haven't really been used in modern type settings since then.

To be honest, I'm using them too. I don't know where I picked it up – books, probably – or whether I'm using them right. I don't think I ever formally learned them, and if I did, it'll have been in German and I have no idea how that transfers to Englush. I also produce slop, but that's on me being an inept writer.

That's why I find such "that's gotta be AI" judgements a bit awkward: it might genuinely be a person poorly trying to ape some writing style they saw but never understood. Just because I'm trying to sound "proper" doesn't mean I'm an AI. My intelligence (or ignorance?) is entirely natural.

Edit: Come to think, I might have picked them up from a certain colleague. MBA, (ab-?)uses them all the time, sometimes in places that seem weird to me, and has done so before LLMs became such a hype. Maybe there's some school of management writing that LLMs are trying to imitate, but without any actual semantic sense for the context, neither they nor I use them in actually valid constructions?