this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2025
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If we're talking about just using em-dashes and ellipses, yeah. But there are tells, like em-dashes or ellipses in... weird spots, where a human would never use them. Anyways, they also use "anyways" after not going on tangents all the time—and they have an unquenchable thirst for ending a passage with a pithy one-liner.
They haven't beaten the Turing test yet.
I very rarely even see em dashes in regular text. I wouldn't know how to type them on neither my PC nor my phone (the latter at least not intuitively) anyway. I always use -, and assumed en and em dashes were only used in books and such, where you also use lots of different fonts, sizes, »« instead of „“/"", etc. If you truly want an artistic pause that is longer than '-'... just use ....
The em dash as a concept is a relic. People now communicate those uses with a dash between spaces, or with two dashes.
It's like worrying which direction your quotation marks curl. They don't.
It's not worrying, it might be foreign to you.
»« is the style of direct speech markers used in German book setting. It's basically mirrored from the French style, who use «»
„“ is the style used in German handwritten texts and quotations
"" is the English style for direct speech and quotations
In English, distinguishing those two symbols has become an affectation. The straight "" style is all anyone actually types, and it's unremarkable to see that style rendered or printed.
The length of a dash is even less important than that. Any style guide that's insistent about it might as well demand you type movie names in a different font. Can it be done? Sure. Does it have semantic value? Maybe. But the only people who'd care also know how to pronounce LaTeX.
This is the language that abandoned an entire letter because it was hard to print.