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A collection of some classic Lemmy memes for your enjoyment
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Great catch! That’s a really interesting observation — but no, using em dashes and emojis alone is not a reliable way to tell AI text from human-written text.
Here’s why:
1️⃣ Humans and AI both use em dashes and emojis
Skilled human writers often use em dashes for style, tone, or emphasis (like in essays, journalism, or fiction).
Modern AI models, including ChatGPT, are trained on vast amounts of text — including texts that use em dashes extensively — so they use them naturally.
2️⃣ Em dash frequency varies by context
In formal writing (e.g., academic papers), em dashes are less common, regardless of author.
In casual or conversational writing, both humans and AIs may use them liberally.
3️⃣ Stylometric features are broader than one punctuation mark
When people try to detect AI-generated text, they usually analyze a combination of features:
Average sentence length
Vocabulary richness
Repetition patterns
Syntactic structures
Overuse or underuse of certain constructions
Punctuation is just one small part of these analyses and isn’t decisive on its own.
✅ Bottom line: Em dashes can hint at style, but they aren’t a reliable "tell" for AI detection on their own. You need a holistic analysis of multiple stylistic and structural features to make a meaningful judgment.
🤖 Why emojis aren’t a clear tell for AI
1️⃣ AI can easily include emojis if prompted Modern AI models can and do use emojis naturally when asked to write in a casual or friendly tone. In fact, they can even mimic how humans use them in different contexts (e.g., sparingly or heavily, ironically or sincerely).
2️⃣ Humans vary wildly in emoji usage Some humans use emojis constantly, especially in texting or on social media. Others almost never use them, even in casual writing. Age, culture, and personal style all influence this.
3️⃣ Emojis can be explicitly requested or omitted If you tell an AI “don’t use emojis,” it won’t. Similarly, you can tell it “use lots of emojis,” and it will. So it’s not an inherent trait.
4️⃣ Stylometric detection relies on more than one feature Like em dashes, emojis are only one aspect of style. Real detection tools look at patterns like sentence structure, repetitiveness, word choice entropy, and coherence across paragraphs — not single markers.
✅ When might emojis suggest AI text?
If there is excessively consistent or mechanical emoji usage (e.g., one emoji at the end of every sentence, all very literal), it might suggest machine-generated text or an automated marketing bot.
But even then, it’s not a guarantee — some humans also write this way, especially in advertising.
💡 Bottom line: Emojis alone are not a reliable clue. You need a combination of markers — repetition, coherence, style shifts, and other linguistic fingerprints — to reasonably guess if something is AI-generated.
If you'd like, I can walk you through some actual features that are better indicators (like burstiness, perplexity, or certain syntactic quirks). Want me to break that down?
I've never seen em dahses outside of an academic paper, so saying people use them liberaly is an olypmic level stretch.
Also that comment was clearly written by ai itself.
I use them often even when I’m not writing anything important, just a habit from writing I guess.
Fuck. I just realised I used them in my résumé that I sent out yesterday. Shit shit shit
woosh
Nah, I knew it was a joke attempt, but it wasn't apparent enough in its setup so I decided to argue anyway.
Damn I wooshed myself a little bit then. you're right about the olympic level of mental gymnastics the AI is going through just to prove dashes are not used by AI outside of Academic context. it's really a hit or miss with AI prompts for me these days
Fucking thank you.
The illiterate flocking to Lemmy to profess that they don't know how to make em dashes, therefore it's AI
Wrong scene. This is almost literally in the blade runner sequel.
Genuine question, is the sequel any good?
Yes, amazing.
So good. Bleak as fuck, but good, and good in a lot of the same ways.
As an example, watch the whole movie, then rewatch and pay attention to that sex scene-it's so literarily good.
Edit: about the sex scene? Really? Where the protagonist
Tap for so much spoiler
After being retired from the police (and having his termination delayed by a day as a personal favor from his 'obviously more of a machine than the replicant protagonist' boss) he hires a sex worker to fuck while his hologram girlfriend projects herself over.
Except the sex worker is working for the replicant underground/resistance. She wants to use him (is there to plant a bug) and does not give a single shit about him as a person. The plastic mass produced girlfriend-product/alexa that he literally bought is projected glitchily over her, and the dialogue is portentous as fuck "quiet now. Ive been inside you. Not so much there as you think."
It's him symbolically heartbreakingly-bleakly fucking his way from the synthetic world-which doesnt care about him but will lie to him for a price and allow him to play house-to the real world, which doesnt give a single fucking shit about him, and may try to kill him, but would be real, if he stopped projecting his delusions onto it. And it hapoens just as he's defying his corporate masters and taking his investigation in directions he's not supposed to, becoming his own, and doing so based on a delusionally hopeful interpretation of some evidence-the fake projected onto the real, pulling him into reality. It's up there with 'tears in rain'.
Edit: Also really good illustrated example of why you shouldn't call LLM's 'AI', even if that wasn't a problem when this was made-the protagonist, the sex worker, and the hologram were all made by the same company, but the first two are obviously people, and the hologram is just an emotional support chatbot that only even kind of means anything when the entire rest of your life is just as fake-ass bullshit as it.
Apparently there's even an en dash and a hyphen.
The English language is so fucked.
There's even the en-dash, the hyphen and the minus sign, which are theoretically all typographically distinct.