So, a lot of people really hate generative "AI", and I am okay with that because I am one of those people. In fact, I think more people should hate generative "AI". I've gone on at length about the reasons for this in a previous blog post, so I won't explain them again in detail here, but very briefly: even aside from questions about quality and intellectual property issues, generative "AI" is terrible for the environment, it's terrible for the economy, and the only reason it's being pushed so hard and shoved into everything is to give the tech industry an illusionary paradigm shift it can pretend to be working toward and to further line the pockets of billionaires.

And some people who really hate generative "AI" like to call out and decry "AI"-generated content when they see it, which I guess I would be okay with in principle, except that it seems a lot of those people are much less skilled at identifying "AI"-generated content than they think they are. I have repeatedly seen people insist particular images have to be generative "AI", citing as "proof" certain parts of the picture being slightly blurry or things lining up oddly or their being unable to identify a particular object in the image and assuming that it must be a digital artifact, only for it to turn out that the image in question is old enough to long predate generative "AI", or that other photographs exist of the object in question from different angles, or that the artist has recordings of the work in progress. And of course the same goes for text; some people like to claim that certain passages of text must be "AI"-generated based on very flimsy evidence, one of the flimsiest yet most frequently invoked types of evidence being the presence of em dashes.

ChatGPT, the most popular text-based generative "AI" "tool", apparently is wont to use a lot of em dashes. Therefore, the argument goes, any passage of text that uses em dashes was obviously produced by ChatGPT, since real people never use em dashes. Which, of course, is nonsense; there are plenty of people who do use em dashes, and had been doing so long before ChatGPT was a thing. In fact, the very fact that ChatGPT uses em dashes is because people used em dashes before it—ChatGPT only mimics patterns in the data it was trained on. Em dashes cannot be easily entered when typing on a keyboard, the argument often continues, so real people when they type use ellipses or double hyphens instead. But this, again, is nonsense; ellipses and em dashes serve different purposes and are not interchangeable, though the distinctions may be subtle and subjective, and as for double hyphens, well, some people may resort to them rather than bother with actual em dashes, but certainly not everyone does—keyboards may not have dedicated keys for em dashes, but there are ways to enter them anyway; it's not that hard. Em dashes are not unique to ChatGPT; from the fact that ChatGPT uses em dashes it does not follow that everything that uses em dashes must have been generated by ChatGPT.

I have a bit of a personal stake in this, I suppose, in that I use em dashes a lot myself, including here on the Wongery—and now I'm kind of apprehensive that someone will accuse me of using ChatGPT to write Wongery articles, because of all the em dashes. I suppose if that happens, I'll point them to this blog post. To be clear, I have never used ChatGPT or any other generative "AI" "service" to write Wongery articles or for anything else, nor do I ever intend to use them. I had been using em dashes long before ChatGPT wormed its unholy way into existence.

The very first article ever posted on the Wongery was the article on the world of Dadauar. It was posted on January 1, 2009, more than six years before OpenAI, the company that would eventually make ChatGPT, was founded. Of course, the article has been heavily expanded and rewritten since then, but given the way that MediaWiki wikis work you can still see the original version—and, notably, it... wait a second, I was going to say it included em dashes, but in fact it didn't. In the places where I would use em dashes today that earliest version has just double hyphens. Huh. Okay, so maybe I didn't use em dashes quite from the very beginning of the Wongery. So when did I start using em dashes in the Wongery?

Okay, it looks like the oldest article where I actually used em dashes was the article on Dverelei, posted on March 12, 2009, and I seem to have used them consistently from then on. (That particular article is credited to Tada, but as I've mentioned before I am responsible for the final edit of all articles posted to the Wongery, so any final punctuation choices—including the use of em dashes—are mine.) So the point still stands; even if I apparently didn't use em dashes in the very first articles, I started using them very early on, and have been using them since long before ChatGPT first cursed the Earth with its vile presence.

When writing articles in the Wongery, I (for no particular reason) write out HTML codes for special characters, so I don't actually write the em dash in articles; I instead write out "&emdash;". However, I also do use em dashes in social media or on fora, and where the HTML codes aren't an option I do use the keyboard code (ALT+0151—I use it often enough I know it by heart). When using a laptop that didn't have a numpad and where therefore ALT code wasn't available, I've even gone so far as to copy an em dash from the associated Wikipedia article or some other webpage that used em dashes, and paste it into my own text—although I admit I am probably an outlier here in that most people aren't quite as dedicated to their use of em dashes as to go to that much bother.

But anyway, let us not besmirch the noble em dash by associating it exclusively with ChatGPT. I do have some sympathy with those who want to point derisive fingers at the use of generative "AI", but the em dash is not a telltale hallmark of "AI"-assisted writing. The em dash has been around for centuries; it serves purposes that no other punctuation mark quite fulfills; it is a thing of beauty and deserves much better than to be dismissed as the work of generative "AI".

That being said, yeah, f*** generative "AI". Just don't f*** the em dash along with it.