Prior to the rise of LLM-written posts and the natural reaction of hair-trigger suspicion, I used to em and en dash fairly often in posts on HN. No reason really other than being a bit of a typography geek who happens to have always used dashes in casual writing instead of semicolons. So when I was setting up a modifier-key keyboard layer with AHK many years ago I put the em dash on modifier+dash just because I could - which made it easy.
Now someone may search old posts without a time cutoff and assume I'm an LLM. That combined with the fact I sometimes write longer posts and naturally default to pretty good punctuation, spelling and grammar, is basically a perfect storm of traits. I've already had posts accused twice in the past year of being an LLM.
Kind of sad some random quirk of LLM training caused a fun little typography thing I did just for myself (assuming no one else would even notice) to become something negative.
Fwiw I did some more comparisons, looking for words disproportionately favored by noob comments:
word noob new p-value
----------------------------
ai 14.93% 7.87% p=0.00016
actually 12.53% 5.34% p=1.1e-05
code 11.47% 6.04% p=0.00081
real 10.93% 2.95% p=2.6e-08
built 10.93% 2.11% p=2.1e-10
data 8.93% 3.51% p=6.1e-05
tools 7.6% 2.67% p=5.5e-05
agent 7.47% 2.95% p=0.00024
app 7.2% 3.09% p=0.00078
tool 6.8% 1.83% p=8.5e-06
model 6.8% 2.39% p=0.00013
agents 6.67% 2.11% p=5.2e-05
api 6.53% 1.12% p=2.7e-07
building 6.13% 1.54% p=1.3e-05
full 6.0% 1.97% p=0.00017
across 5.87% 1.4% p=1.3e-05
interesting 5.33% 1.54% p=0.00014
answer 5.2% 1.4% p=9.6e-05
simple 4.93% 1.54% p=0.00043
project 4.8% 1.26% p=0.00015
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d4mi3n
I'm still salty that I can't use em-dashes anymore for fear of my writing being flagged as AI generated. Been using them for years—it's just `alt+shift+-` on a Mac keyboard and I find them more legible in many fonts compared to the simple dash on the typical numpad.
It's so sad to me that good typographical conventions have been co-opted by the zeitgeist of LLMs.
This feels like an existential threat to HN, and to the general concept of anonymous online discourse. Trust in the platform is foundational, and without it the whole thing falls down.
Requiring proof of identity is the only solution I can think of, despite how unappealing it is. And even then, you'll still have people handing their account over to an LLM.
I really struggle to imagine a way around it. It could be that the future is just smaller, closed groups of people you know or know indirectly.
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rob
Most of the bots I've caught on here don't really use em dashes at all.
For example, here's an active bot that posted 30 mins ago (as of this comment):
If it wasn't for them misconfiguring their bot and having it post so quickly, these would go by undetected and most people would engage with them. The comments themselves seem "normal" at first glance.
One pattern I've noticed recently is sort of formulaic comments that look okish on their own, maybe a bit abstract/vague/bland, and not taking a particular side on good/bad in the way people like to do, but really obviously AI when you look at the account history and they're all the same formula:
>this is [summary]
>not just x, it's y
>punchy ending, maybe question
Once you know it's AI it's very obvious they told it to use normal dashes instead of em dashes, type in lowercase, etc., but it's still weirdly formal and formulaic.
"this is the underreported second-order risk. Micron, Samsung, SK Hynix all allocated HBM capacity based on hyperscaler capex projections. NAND fabs are similarly committed. a 57% reduction in projected OpenAI spend (.4T -> B) doesn't just affect NVIDIA orders -- it ripples into the memory suppliers who shifted capacity to HBM and away from commodity DRAM/NAND. if multiple hyperscalers revise down simultaneously you get a situation similar to the 2019 crypto ASIC overhang: companies tooled up for demand that evaporated. not predicting that, but the purchasing commitments question is real."
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atourgates
Shoutout to my English Major comrades who have been using em-dashes forever, and have had to stop so we don't sound like AI.
If AI starts use the New Yorker style diaeresis (umlaut-looking thing when there are two vowels in words like coöperate) I swear I'm gonna lose it.
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maurycyz
Most people want to avoid looking like AI, ut what if you want to blend in with the robot uprising.
I present ⸻ the U+2E3B dash.
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StarterPro
I assumed everyone was just using an LLM to give the best response.
Honestly I've lost all respect for people who use LLM generated anything.
AustinDev
Downstream of this I used to cycle my accounts pretty regularly but have stopped since generative AI. Don't want people thinking I'm an LLM spam bot. My stupid comments are entirely my own.
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vjerancrnjak
On reddit it's even worse, I feel like Reddit is internally having their own bots for engagement bait.
As someone who loves LaTeX, I can't imagine ever spending so much time on typography on online forums, italics, bold, emdashes, headers, sections. I quit reddit and will quit hn as well if situation worsens.
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hartator
Biggest tell that a comment is AI: it's deeply uninteresting.
(2) I do recommend taking one minute to dash a note off to hn@ycombinator.com if you see suspicious patterns. Dang and our other intrepid mods are preturnatually responsive, and appear to appreciate the extra eyeballs on the problem.
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blahgeek
It may be related to the fact that some non-native English speakers (including myself) would sometimes use AI based tools to revise or translate their writings before posting online
marginalia_nu
(author) I saw a 32:1 rate of EM-dashes last night when I just eyeballed the first 3 pages of /newcomments and /noobcomments. So I'm not sure how stable this is over over time.
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aubanel
> Comments from newly registered accounts on HN are also more likely to mention AI and LLMs
-> to be fair there must also be a bias of young incoming ppl on HN being more prone to be starting their career on the hot new tech
SkyeCA
If I see an em-dash in a comment I stop reading and I've seriously considered setting up a filter across multiple sites to remove any comments containing one.
I know there are legitimate usecases for the em-dash, but a few paragraphs (at most) of text in an HN/Reddit comment? Into the trash it goes.
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mkprc
A counter comment: I'll bet many folks didn't know what an em-dash was until the whole "you can tell it's AI because of the em-dashes" thing. Then everyone learned what an em-dash is, and every pause in every sentence thereafter suddenly deserves an em-dash. While I suspect it's mostly bots, the number of sincere (human) new em-dashers isn't negligible.
arjie
I noticed a similar trend a couple of weeks ago so I auto-hide green comments now. I also autohide all top 1000 user accounts but it strikes me that perhaps I should also choose a “user signed up on $date” filter that precedes OpenClaw.
onion2k
I’ve had this sense that HN has gotten absolutely innundated with bots last few months.
Is it possible to differentiate between a bot, and a human using AI to 'improve' the quality of their comment where some of the content might be AI written but not all? I don't think it is.
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eterm
It's the "incredibly banal" comments that upset me. The ones that just re-state the article in one or two uncontraversial sentences.
Often lean slightly pro-AI, but otherwise avoid saying much about anything.
doe88
I don't understand what is the purpose of these bots? Nihilism? Vandalism? At first I doubted when people were saying that such and such comments was AI generated, I didn't understand the goal, the motives so I thought it couldn't be ; but lately I understood how dead wrong I was, we are submerged, I came to realize that we are eaten by a sea of these useless comments.
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comrade1234
You can turn off iOS automatically converting dashes to em-dashes. It also turns off smart-quotes which when used converts any sms you send from normal GSM-7 (7-bit) encoding to utf-8 which doubles the number of sms messages you're sending in the background (even though they're stitched together to look like a single message)
To turn off Smart Punctuation: Home > Settings > General > Keyboard > Smart Punctuation > Off.
brianstorms
I read every book written by Robert Caro—now there was an author who loved em-dashes!
I enjoyed his use of them so much in his writing that I started using them in my own book that came out in 2017. I freely admit—without hesitation—that my own use of em-dashes is due to author Robert Caro's influence.
There is much amusement at the idea that tech-weenies today are freaking out that the appearance of em-dashes in text is a surefire tell that so-called "AI" generated said text.
Read some books, get away from the computer, eh?
afro88
Honestly, comments are just half the problem. At least half the articles I read from HN are vibe written. And I only spot it after reading a few paragraphs. It's leaving a bad taste, and it's sad because HN was guaranteed to have plenty of things worth reading and it's deteriorating
npilk
@dang would there be any possibility of creating a view that hides posts and comments by accounts newer than, say, Jan 1 2026? Similar to how https://news.ycombinator.com/classic works (only showing votes from the oldest accounts)?
I know this is unfair to prospective new community members, but I'm unsure of other good methods to filter out AI bots at scale. Would certainly welcome other ideas.
There is one thing I am the most scared off and that is believing a comment, video, picture is AI generated while it wasnt.
There is no real AI detection tool that works.
When we see something like emd-ashes its simply the average of the used text the models trained on. If you fall into one the averages of a model you basically part of the model ouput. Yikes.
IFC_LLC
I'd notice one thing: I use LLMs to spellcheck and when I do, here is your barrage of em-dashes.
D_R_Farrell
You'll have to pry the – from my cold, dead hands
2c0m
My writing style is influenced a lot by what I read. Because I read a lot of LLM output I use more - phrasing in my writing.
I'm also influenced by the email style of my colleagues, books I'm reading, X, etc.
My literary diet really does show in my writing, so I'll keep up reading the classics to balance out all the LLM content :)
seewhat
I’ve occasionally found myself wanting a comments filter with an account-creation date cutoff.
A -3dB cutoff might be >= 01/01/2020, to pick a round figure.
It would be trivial to make a HN comment agent that avoids all the usual hallmarks of AI writing. Mere estimations of bot activity based on character frequency would likely underestimate their presence.
dalemhurley
Several factors:
1. Em dashes are common use in the Queens English
2. People with dyslexia and dysgraphia can more easily interact online
3. People who speak a primary language other than English can more easily interact online
The last 2 options mean people who previously would have been more reluctant to participate now have less of a barrier.
So while there may be AI generated content, we should just assume it is all negative.
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andrewmthomas87
My truth is that the LLM usage of em-dashes doesn’t seem excessive. If anything, the kind of text generated by LLMs (somewhat informal, expressive) calls for em-dashes at a higher frequency.
vardalab
My STT is cleaned up using llm and it often likes those dashes. I let it be because I could not care less.
bobomonkey
I had a past life of drumming up community comments for engagment: The only thing that's changed is that humans are getting lazy and using AI. Fake comments have always been a thing.
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bee_rider
700 is actually a pretty good sample size unless you are looking at some tiny crosstab, or there’s some skew (which you won’t naively scale your way out of anyway).
It is also interesting to note that the comparison is between recent comments and recent comments by new users. So, I guess this would take care of the objection that em-dashes (a perfectly fine piece of punctuation) have just been popularized by bots, and now are used more often by humans as well.
Maybe there is a bot problem. Seems almost impossible to fix for a site like this…
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lokimedes
Actually I love the — ever since my first Mac, I have enjoyed the finer characters of typography. It’s much easier to access on a Mac keyboard. Not saying the proliferation of AI has that as a signature, like the weird phrasing, but at least allow for the few mammals who likes to indulge.
Velocifyer
I find that specifically GPT4 uses a lot on em dashes. I find that it uses em-dashes when it is not usefull.
escapeteam
Why is the em dash so popular with LLMs, given that they are likely not as popular in the writings used for training them?
peterfirefly
I would use em-dashes all the time if they were easier to type.
jatins
The part that doesn't make sense to me is: Why? As in what are the incentives to use AI to write comments on HN? This is not a platform like Youtube or X where views get you money. Is this just for internet karma?
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minimaxir
You'd think that by now people running bots would just set a system prompt instruction to "Never use em-dashes." That still works even with modern models.
emulatedmedia
If we are ok with flooding the world with AI generated software. I find it funny to reject the increase of comments or even articles written by AI. Can't have the cake and eat it too or something like that
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HardwareLust
I'm just going to continue to mis-use the en-dash like I've always done.
I used to love using em-dashes in my texts, especially in titles. Now I am way too afraid of appearing as using an LLM while I do my best to redact everything by myself :')
Bye bye em-dash, we had a nice run together.
I might start using that⸻one (a bit long...)
sebastianconcpt
Funny to see this after me being influenced to use em dashes more adequately in my blog :)
Good to know so I don't do it x10 more :D
solomonb
TBH, i've largely stopped correcting any spelling or grammar mistakes in my communcations as a way to assert I am a human.
I had no idea what I was using were called “EM-dashes” until the AI bubble. I just used them to reflect pauses in my speech for tangents - an old habit from my IRC days.
Incidentally, some folks reported my stuff for potential AI generation and I had to respond to the mods about it. So that was kinda funny, if also sad to hear that some folks thought I was a bot.
I’m a dinosaur, not a robot dinosaur. I’m nowhere near that cool, alas.
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emsign
As someone who has the key combos Alt-0150 and Alt-0151 saved in muscle memory I feel offended by being compared to a machine.
dieselgate
I get the punchline here but is there possibly some sort of Streisand effect where real people now are more inclined to use an em dash?
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716dpl
As a typography nerd, I’m upset that my pedantism may get me labelled as a bot. (Yes, I just used a typographic apostrophe instead of a straight single quote.)
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podgorniy
Poor poor those typography-savvy people who did set a special keyboard in order to type "proper" dashes. I know you are there, I know your pain.
Makes me wonder the ratio between LLM commenters versus those aligning with an LLMs syntax.
Not sure which is scarier
patjensen
10x more likely to use EM-dashes -- built in Rust?
Rooster61
I would like to formally petition that the tech world at large replace "em-dash" with "clank" in all correspondence
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zippyman55
I think they will remake the Japanese horror film Matango but instead of fungi, it will be those that use EM dashes to survive.
pronik
Our life has become so dumb in certain ways. There are people who invested heavily in learning their mother or a foreign language, its spelling, grammar, syntax and idiosyncrasies, like when to use an em-dash, an Oxford comma, a semicolon, an ellipsis -- these smart educated people now seriously deliberate whether using wrong dashes and adding a spelling mistake or two would be a good way to prove you are a human (I think we never should have allowed the framing of CAPTCHA to be "prove you are not a robot", it was demeaning back then and still is now, it's just that the alternatives were not and still aren't clear-cut). The same things that would have made you fail a written essay in school are somehow becoming a requirement, but not in "haX0r" or online communities where "writing funny" has always been a differentiating factor, but for absolutely everybody who has to communicate with others in written form.
It's of course not a surprise that an LLM would be most proficient in language use and, adjacent to that, in proper formatting of said language. But it's a good thing and a good tool for writing, as anyone who has ever used a classic spell or grammar checker will attest to. But apparently we as a society have once again managed to completely overlook and demonise the good and now people who have paid attention in school have to bow to people who are somehow convinced that perfect spelling is a sign that someone cheated. This is not LLMs' fault, it's people's who think they've understood something when they really haven't, crying heresy over others doing things the correct way.
That being said: of course there are social and technological challenges with cheating, spam bots and sock puppets and what not, but the phenomenon itself is not really new, just the scale, cost and quality is way different now. We need to find a balanced way to approach it -- trying to weed out every last possible AI cheater while hurting real innocent people in the process is not worth it. Especially since we don't have a proper metric to actually prove who's a cheater and who is not, it's gotten way harder since the days of "As a large language model" being in every second sentence.
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northisup
damnit, I just happen to like the look of the thing. now everyone thinks I'm AI for pausing in my thoughts as I write—as if I were human...
technotony
Why? What's the incentive/value to commenting here with AI?
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dvh
I wonder if some people here considered me ai at some point
iambateman
TBH, I learned about how to use em dashes from the AI controversy and now I find them really useful.
I just hope my writing carries enough voice and perspective that people respond, even if there's an em dash or two.
5o1ecist
As an AI language model, I am not able to perform dashes.
steveBK123
This is like how I noticed the increase in thoughtbros on LinkedIn posting longform writing since the advent of LLMs..
reducesuffering
It has been obvious since ChatGPT that the internet, including HN, will be flooded with AI generated commentary, drowning out real peoples' voices (soon undetectable). How this is surprising to anyone is a mystery.
tristor
Weirdly, I learned that it was important to use proper grammar, spelling, and punctuation due to getting repeatedly dunked on in IRC long before the dawn of LLMs. I have no intent of changing, and people thought I was an "old" when I was younger because I texted with correct language, I'm sure people suspect I'm an LLM now. I don't care, and I don't try to guess for other comments either, I care if the content is relevant, accurate, and useful or interesting.
eisa01
Good thing I prefer en-dashes :)
tonymet
I won't support this rampant emdashophobia. The internet deserves better typography.
So much so that I've started a Wikipedia project to replace the dashes and other abysmal characters with proper typography.
All of my devices replace hyphens with emdashes, ascii typography with glorious unicode, etc.
OutOfHere
The fear is that AI-generated comments will collectively promote an agenda, often a political or exploitative agenda, on a scale that humans can't match or hope to counter.
What could help is a careful clique hunting algorithm to accurately identify and delete the entire clique.
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baxuz
I have "—" bound to AltGR/right option + "-" for a decade now and I don't intend to stop using it.
I will not allow my good practices to get co-opted as AI "smoke tests".
WhereIsTheTruth
Not everyone speaks English natively—most have relied on Google Translate in the past, and now they turn to AI tools. There's nothing wrong with that, provided they're using these tools to express their own thoughts rather than for spam or botting.
^ And that's what i just did
bediger4000
This is pretty damning. It would be interesting to see if new accounts collect karma at any rate whatsoever.
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adamtaylor_13
AI has taken this from me—I will never forgive.
But seriously, I loved the em-dash and now every time I use it (which is too often) I have to wonder if my words will immediately be written off.
nubg
Check my history, I get downvoted to hell everytime I truthfully point out AI slop.
kklisura
Off-topic, tangentially:
Can we generate a huge amount of code, just compilable code, which is essentially just a trash. We seed the github, bitbucket, etc. and pollute the training grounds.
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izucken
I feel a sort of disappointment in how easily languages got swindled. There is seemingly no winning angle this time. This is the most doomed I've ever felt.
mm0lqf
doesn't really mean anything, Mac randomly autocorrects dashes to em-dashes (caused me a world of pain once when it did that in a GUID in a config file)
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FergusArgyll
This user [0] is clearly a bot and has been shadowbanned but some of it's comments get vouched because they're pretty good. I don't see how you solve that problem!
Troll farms hastily adding to their init prompts "don't use emdash when writing comments"
CrzyLngPwd
It's a predictable outcome, and it will get worse.
What will/can HN do about it?
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artemonster
whats the point of botting comments on HN? can someone explain?
bitwize
How many of those are bots and how many of those are "fuck you, clankers" humans—like me?
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meindnoch
Anyone have a lobste.rs invite?
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burnt-resistor
Something about correlation and causation of magic gotcha signals. Text may appear generated to a reader but there's no smoking gun evidence that can disambiguate fact from hypothesis. Even intuition isn't evidence.
Perhaps there needs to be some sort of voluntary ethical disclosure practice to disclaim text as AI-generated with some sort of unusual signifiers. „Lower double quotes perhaps?„
emilsedgh
dang, you should consider this an existential threat to hn.
I hate myself for saying this, but HN should consider closing new registrations for a while until we figure out what to do with this.
taeric
Wow. This made me laugh far harder than I would have thought it would. Just wow.
Prior to the rise of LLM-written posts and the natural reaction of hair-trigger suspicion, I used to em and en dash fairly often in posts on HN. No reason really other than being a bit of a typography geek who happens to have always used dashes in casual writing instead of semicolons. So when I was setting up a modifier-key keyboard layer with AHK many years ago I put the em dash on modifier+dash just because I could - which made it easy.
Now someone may search old posts without a time cutoff and assume I'm an LLM. That combined with the fact I sometimes write longer posts and naturally default to pretty good punctuation, spelling and grammar, is basically a perfect storm of traits. I've already had posts accused twice in the past year of being an LLM.
Kind of sad some random quirk of LLM training caused a fun little typography thing I did just for myself (assuming no one else would even notice) to become something negative.
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Fwiw I did some more comparisons, looking for words disproportionately favored by noob comments:
I'm still salty that I can't use em-dashes anymore for fear of my writing being flagged as AI generated. Been using them for years—it's just `alt+shift+-` on a Mac keyboard and I find them more legible in many fonts compared to the simple dash on the typical numpad.
It's so sad to me that good typographical conventions have been co-opted by the zeitgeist of LLMs.
The data is available in a SQLite database on GitHub: https://github.com/vlofgren/hn-green-clankers
You can explore the underlying data using SQL queries in your browser here: https://lite.datasette.io/?url=https%253A%252F%252Fraw.githu... (that's Datasette Lite, my build of the Datasette Python web app that runs in Pyodide in WebAssembly)
Here's a SQL query that shows the users in that data that posted the most comments with at least one em dash - the top ones all look like legitimate accounts to me: https://lite.datasette.io/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fraw.githubuserc...
This feels like an existential threat to HN, and to the general concept of anonymous online discourse. Trust in the platform is foundational, and without it the whole thing falls down.
Requiring proof of identity is the only solution I can think of, despite how unappealing it is. And even then, you'll still have people handing their account over to an LLM.
I really struggle to imagine a way around it. It could be that the future is just smaller, closed groups of people you know or know indirectly.
Most of the bots I've caught on here don't really use em dashes at all.
For example, here's an active bot that posted 30 mins ago (as of this comment):
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=aplomb1026
Examine the last two detailed comments it made and you'll see the timestamps show they were posted < 30 seconds apart:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47155655
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47155648
If it wasn't for them misconfiguring their bot and having it post so quickly, these would go by undetected and most people would engage with them. The comments themselves seem "normal" at first glance.
---
Other bots:
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dirtytoken7
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=fdefitte
One pattern I've noticed recently is sort of formulaic comments that look okish on their own, maybe a bit abstract/vague/bland, and not taking a particular side on good/bad in the way people like to do, but really obviously AI when you look at the account history and they're all the same formula:
>this is [summary]
>not just x, it's y
>punchy ending, maybe question
Once you know it's AI it's very obvious they told it to use normal dashes instead of em dashes, type in lowercase, etc., but it's still weirdly formal and formulaic.
For example from https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=snowhale
"this is the underreported second-order risk. Micron, Samsung, SK Hynix all allocated HBM capacity based on hyperscaler capex projections. NAND fabs are similarly committed. a 57% reduction in projected OpenAI spend (.4T -> B) doesn't just affect NVIDIA orders -- it ripples into the memory suppliers who shifted capacity to HBM and away from commodity DRAM/NAND. if multiple hyperscalers revise down simultaneously you get a situation similar to the 2019 crypto ASIC overhang: companies tooled up for demand that evaporated. not predicting that, but the purchasing commitments question is real."
Shoutout to my English Major comrades who have been using em-dashes forever, and have had to stop so we don't sound like AI.
If AI starts use the New Yorker style diaeresis (umlaut-looking thing when there are two vowels in words like coöperate) I swear I'm gonna lose it.
Most people want to avoid looking like AI, ut what if you want to blend in with the robot uprising.
I present ⸻ the U+2E3B dash.
I assumed everyone was just using an LLM to give the best response.
Honestly I've lost all respect for people who use LLM generated anything.
Downstream of this I used to cycle my accounts pretty regularly but have stopped since generative AI. Don't want people thinking I'm an LLM spam bot. My stupid comments are entirely my own.
On reddit it's even worse, I feel like Reddit is internally having their own bots for engagement bait.
As someone who loves LaTeX, I can't imagine ever spending so much time on typography on online forums, italics, bold, emdashes, headers, sections. I quit reddit and will quit hn as well if situation worsens.
Biggest tell that a comment is AI: it's deeply uninteresting.
No one wants to read your ChatGPT outputs.
A couple thoughts:
(1) I don't recommend focusing disproportionately on one signal. They'll change, and are incredibly easy to optimize for. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing
(2) I do recommend taking one minute to dash a note off to hn@ycombinator.com if you see suspicious patterns. Dang and our other intrepid mods are preturnatually responsive, and appear to appreciate the extra eyeballs on the problem.
It may be related to the fact that some non-native English speakers (including myself) would sometimes use AI based tools to revise or translate their writings before posting online
(author) I saw a 32:1 rate of EM-dashes last night when I just eyeballed the first 3 pages of /newcomments and /noobcomments. So I'm not sure how stable this is over over time.
> Comments from newly registered accounts on HN are also more likely to mention AI and LLMs
-> to be fair there must also be a bias of young incoming ppl on HN being more prone to be starting their career on the hot new tech
If I see an em-dash in a comment I stop reading and I've seriously considered setting up a filter across multiple sites to remove any comments containing one.
I know there are legitimate usecases for the em-dash, but a few paragraphs (at most) of text in an HN/Reddit comment? Into the trash it goes.
A counter comment: I'll bet many folks didn't know what an em-dash was until the whole "you can tell it's AI because of the em-dashes" thing. Then everyone learned what an em-dash is, and every pause in every sentence thereafter suddenly deserves an em-dash. While I suspect it's mostly bots, the number of sincere (human) new em-dashers isn't negligible.
I noticed a similar trend a couple of weeks ago so I auto-hide green comments now. I also autohide all top 1000 user accounts but it strikes me that perhaps I should also choose a “user signed up on $date” filter that precedes OpenClaw.
I’ve had this sense that HN has gotten absolutely innundated with bots last few months.
Is it possible to differentiate between a bot, and a human using AI to 'improve' the quality of their comment where some of the content might be AI written but not all? I don't think it is.
It's the "incredibly banal" comments that upset me. The ones that just re-state the article in one or two uncontraversial sentences.
Often lean slightly pro-AI, but otherwise avoid saying much about anything.
I don't understand what is the purpose of these bots? Nihilism? Vandalism? At first I doubted when people were saying that such and such comments was AI generated, I didn't understand the goal, the motives so I thought it couldn't be ; but lately I understood how dead wrong I was, we are submerged, I came to realize that we are eaten by a sea of these useless comments.
You can turn off iOS automatically converting dashes to em-dashes. It also turns off smart-quotes which when used converts any sms you send from normal GSM-7 (7-bit) encoding to utf-8 which doubles the number of sms messages you're sending in the background (even though they're stitched together to look like a single message)
To turn off Smart Punctuation: Home > Settings > General > Keyboard > Smart Punctuation > Off.
I read every book written by Robert Caro—now there was an author who loved em-dashes!
I enjoyed his use of them so much in his writing that I started using them in my own book that came out in 2017. I freely admit—without hesitation—that my own use of em-dashes is due to author Robert Caro's influence.
There is much amusement at the idea that tech-weenies today are freaking out that the appearance of em-dashes in text is a surefire tell that so-called "AI" generated said text.
Read some books, get away from the computer, eh?
Honestly, comments are just half the problem. At least half the articles I read from HN are vibe written. And I only spot it after reading a few paragraphs. It's leaving a bad taste, and it's sad because HN was guaranteed to have plenty of things worth reading and it's deteriorating
@dang would there be any possibility of creating a view that hides posts and comments by accounts newer than, say, Jan 1 2026? Similar to how https://news.ycombinator.com/classic works (only showing votes from the oldest accounts)?
I know this is unfair to prospective new community members, but I'm unsure of other good methods to filter out AI bots at scale. Would certainly welcome other ideas.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
Don’t mind me, just skewing the results. — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — results. — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — results. — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — results. — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — results. — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — results. — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — results. — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
There is one thing I am the most scared off and that is believing a comment, video, picture is AI generated while it wasnt.
There is no real AI detection tool that works.
When we see something like emd-ashes its simply the average of the used text the models trained on. If you fall into one the averages of a model you basically part of the model ouput. Yikes.
I'd notice one thing: I use LLMs to spellcheck and when I do, here is your barrage of em-dashes.
You'll have to pry the – from my cold, dead hands
My writing style is influenced a lot by what I read. Because I read a lot of LLM output I use more - phrasing in my writing.
I'm also influenced by the email style of my colleagues, books I'm reading, X, etc.
My literary diet really does show in my writing, so I'll keep up reading the classics to balance out all the LLM content :)
I’ve occasionally found myself wanting a comments filter with an account-creation date cutoff.
A -3dB cutoff might be >= 01/01/2020, to pick a round figure.
Yet I never browse https://news.ycombinator.com/classic
Perhaps a classic comment filter might work…
It would be trivial to make a HN comment agent that avoids all the usual hallmarks of AI writing. Mere estimations of bot activity based on character frequency would likely underestimate their presence.
Several factors: 1. Em dashes are common use in the Queens English
2. People with dyslexia and dysgraphia can more easily interact online
3. People who speak a primary language other than English can more easily interact online
The last 2 options mean people who previously would have been more reluctant to participate now have less of a barrier.
So while there may be AI generated content, we should just assume it is all negative.
My truth is that the LLM usage of em-dashes doesn’t seem excessive. If anything, the kind of text generated by LLMs (somewhat informal, expressive) calls for em-dashes at a higher frequency.
My STT is cleaned up using llm and it often likes those dashes. I let it be because I could not care less.
I had a past life of drumming up community comments for engagment: The only thing that's changed is that humans are getting lazy and using AI. Fake comments have always been a thing.
700 is actually a pretty good sample size unless you are looking at some tiny crosstab, or there’s some skew (which you won’t naively scale your way out of anyway).
It is also interesting to note that the comparison is between recent comments and recent comments by new users. So, I guess this would take care of the objection that em-dashes (a perfectly fine piece of punctuation) have just been popularized by bots, and now are used more often by humans as well.
Maybe there is a bot problem. Seems almost impossible to fix for a site like this…
Actually I love the — ever since my first Mac, I have enjoyed the finer characters of typography. It’s much easier to access on a Mac keyboard. Not saying the proliferation of AI has that as a signature, like the weird phrasing, but at least allow for the few mammals who likes to indulge.
I find that specifically GPT4 uses a lot on em dashes. I find that it uses em-dashes when it is not usefull.
Why is the em dash so popular with LLMs, given that they are likely not as popular in the writings used for training them?
I would use em-dashes all the time if they were easier to type.
The part that doesn't make sense to me is: Why? As in what are the incentives to use AI to write comments on HN? This is not a platform like Youtube or X where views get you money. Is this just for internet karma?
You'd think that by now people running bots would just set a system prompt instruction to "Never use em-dashes." That still works even with modern models.
If we are ok with flooding the world with AI generated software. I find it funny to reject the increase of comments or even articles written by AI. Can't have the cake and eat it too or something like that
I'm just going to continue to mis-use the en-dash like I've always done.
Give me back my em dash (2025):
https://acuoptimist.com/2025/12/give-me-back-my-em-dash/
I used to love using em-dashes in my texts, especially in titles. Now I am way too afraid of appearing as using an LLM while I do my best to redact everything by myself :')
Bye bye em-dash, we had a nice run together.
I might start using that⸻one (a bit long...)
Funny to see this after me being influenced to use em dashes more adequately in my blog :)
Good to know so I don't do it x10 more :D
TBH, i've largely stopped correcting any spelling or grammar mistakes in my communcations as a way to assert I am a human.
Related:
Show HN: Hacker News em dash user leaderboard pre-ChatGPT - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45071722 - Aug 2025 (266 comments)
... which I'm proud to say originated here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45046883.
I call it stylometric---obfuscation!
I had no idea what I was using were called “EM-dashes” until the AI bubble. I just used them to reflect pauses in my speech for tangents - an old habit from my IRC days.
Incidentally, some folks reported my stuff for potential AI generation and I had to respond to the mods about it. So that was kinda funny, if also sad to hear that some folks thought I was a bot.
I’m a dinosaur, not a robot dinosaur. I’m nowhere near that cool, alas.
As someone who has the key combos Alt-0150 and Alt-0151 saved in muscle memory I feel offended by being compared to a machine.
I get the punchline here but is there possibly some sort of Streisand effect where real people now are more inclined to use an em dash?
As a typography nerd, I’m upset that my pedantism may get me labelled as a bot. (Yes, I just used a typographic apostrophe instead of a straight single quote.)
Poor poor those typography-savvy people who did set a special keyboard in order to type "proper" dashes. I know you are there, I know your pain.
https://news.ycombinator.com/classic is every day more compelling.
Makes me wonder the ratio between LLM commenters versus those aligning with an LLMs syntax.
Not sure which is scarier
10x more likely to use EM-dashes -- built in Rust?
I would like to formally petition that the tech world at large replace "em-dash" with "clank" in all correspondence
I think they will remake the Japanese horror film Matango but instead of fungi, it will be those that use EM dashes to survive.
Our life has become so dumb in certain ways. There are people who invested heavily in learning their mother or a foreign language, its spelling, grammar, syntax and idiosyncrasies, like when to use an em-dash, an Oxford comma, a semicolon, an ellipsis -- these smart educated people now seriously deliberate whether using wrong dashes and adding a spelling mistake or two would be a good way to prove you are a human (I think we never should have allowed the framing of CAPTCHA to be "prove you are not a robot", it was demeaning back then and still is now, it's just that the alternatives were not and still aren't clear-cut). The same things that would have made you fail a written essay in school are somehow becoming a requirement, but not in "haX0r" or online communities where "writing funny" has always been a differentiating factor, but for absolutely everybody who has to communicate with others in written form.
It's of course not a surprise that an LLM would be most proficient in language use and, adjacent to that, in proper formatting of said language. But it's a good thing and a good tool for writing, as anyone who has ever used a classic spell or grammar checker will attest to. But apparently we as a society have once again managed to completely overlook and demonise the good and now people who have paid attention in school have to bow to people who are somehow convinced that perfect spelling is a sign that someone cheated. This is not LLMs' fault, it's people's who think they've understood something when they really haven't, crying heresy over others doing things the correct way.
That being said: of course there are social and technological challenges with cheating, spam bots and sock puppets and what not, but the phenomenon itself is not really new, just the scale, cost and quality is way different now. We need to find a balanced way to approach it -- trying to weed out every last possible AI cheater while hurting real innocent people in the process is not worth it. Especially since we don't have a proper metric to actually prove who's a cheater and who is not, it's gotten way harder since the days of "As a large language model" being in every second sentence.
damnit, I just happen to like the look of the thing. now everyone thinks I'm AI for pausing in my thoughts as I write—as if I were human...
Why? What's the incentive/value to commenting here with AI?
I wonder if some people here considered me ai at some point
TBH, I learned about how to use em dashes from the AI controversy and now I find them really useful.
I just hope my writing carries enough voice and perspective that people respond, even if there's an em dash or two.
As an AI language model, I am not able to perform dashes.
This is like how I noticed the increase in thoughtbros on LinkedIn posting longform writing since the advent of LLMs..
It has been obvious since ChatGPT that the internet, including HN, will be flooded with AI generated commentary, drowning out real peoples' voices (soon undetectable). How this is surprising to anyone is a mystery.
Weirdly, I learned that it was important to use proper grammar, spelling, and punctuation due to getting repeatedly dunked on in IRC long before the dawn of LLMs. I have no intent of changing, and people thought I was an "old" when I was younger because I texted with correct language, I'm sure people suspect I'm an LLM now. I don't care, and I don't try to guess for other comments either, I care if the content is relevant, accurate, and useful or interesting.
Good thing I prefer en-dashes :)
I won't support this rampant emdashophobia. The internet deserves better typography.
So much so that I've started a Wikipedia project to replace the dashes and other abysmal characters with proper typography.
All of my devices replace hyphens with emdashes, ascii typography with glorious unicode, etc.
The fear is that AI-generated comments will collectively promote an agenda, often a political or exploitative agenda, on a scale that humans can't match or hope to counter.
What could help is a careful clique hunting algorithm to accurately identify and delete the entire clique.
I have "—" bound to AltGR/right option + "-" for a decade now and I don't intend to stop using it.
https://practicaltypography.com/hyphens-and-dashes.html
I will not allow my good practices to get co-opted as AI "smoke tests".
Not everyone speaks English natively—most have relied on Google Translate in the past, and now they turn to AI tools. There's nothing wrong with that, provided they're using these tools to express their own thoughts rather than for spam or botting.
^ And that's what i just did
This is pretty damning. It would be interesting to see if new accounts collect karma at any rate whatsoever.
AI has taken this from me—I will never forgive.
But seriously, I loved the em-dash and now every time I use it (which is too often) I have to wonder if my words will immediately be written off.
Check my history, I get downvoted to hell everytime I truthfully point out AI slop.
Off-topic, tangentially:
Can we generate a huge amount of code, just compilable code, which is essentially just a trash. We seed the github, bitbucket, etc. and pollute the training grounds.
I feel a sort of disappointment in how easily languages got swindled. There is seemingly no winning angle this time. This is the most doomed I've ever felt.
doesn't really mean anything, Mac randomly autocorrects dashes to em-dashes (caused me a world of pain once when it did that in a GUID in a config file)
This user [0] is clearly a bot and has been shadowbanned but some of it's comments get vouched because they're pretty good. I don't see how you solve that problem!
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=octoclaw
Troll farms hastily adding to their init prompts "don't use emdash when writing comments"
It's a predictable outcome, and it will get worse.
What will/can HN do about it?
whats the point of botting comments on HN? can someone explain?
How many of those are bots and how many of those are "fuck you, clankers" humans—like me?
Anyone have a lobste.rs invite?
Something about correlation and causation of magic gotcha signals. Text may appear generated to a reader but there's no smoking gun evidence that can disambiguate fact from hypothesis. Even intuition isn't evidence.
Perhaps there needs to be some sort of voluntary ethical disclosure practice to disclaim text as AI-generated with some sort of unusual signifiers. „Lower double quotes perhaps?„
dang, you should consider this an existential threat to hn.
I hate myself for saying this, but HN should consider closing new registrations for a while until we figure out what to do with this.
Wow. This made me laugh far harder than I would have thought it would. Just wow.