Ask HN: Why does LLMs love the usage of –?

[reimertz]

It was really uncommon pre-ai that you saw the usage of — in emails. So I wonder why all LLMs default to it so often?

An example;

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It's such a giveway for AI-generated content that I prompt "Please don't use – in any of your responses."

[mrpound]

Em-dashes historically been very common in nonfiction and literature and are a very versatile way to compose more complex sentences and provide an alternative to comma-separated clauses, colons, parentheses, etc. I think AI is just reflecting something that fell out of common usage as part of a general trend of people reading less and paying less attention to punctuation and sentence construction. Now it's seen as a tell for someone using AI, but if you pick up any book written in the last 200 years you'll see tons of em-dashes.

[weldu → mrpound]

For reference, the Bible, which was written/translated long before LLMs, uses em dashes numerous times

[reimertz → mrpound]

So a good tell on me that I need to read more books. :)

[yepyoukno]

As a list item delineation?

It is both the YAML and Markdown convention is it not?

Or are you referring to some other context?

[minimaxir → yepyoukno]

They are referring to em-dashes, not normal dashes.