this post was submitted on 30 May 2026
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Why do AI models use so many em-dashes? (www.seangoedecke.com)
submitted 1 month ago by lemmydividebyzero@reddthat.com to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] unpossum@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 month ago

State-of-the-art models rely on late-1800s and early-1900s print books for high-quality training data, and those books use ~30% more em-dashes than contemporary English prose. That’s why it’s so hard to get models to stop using em-dashes: because they learned English from texts that were full of them.

That sounds really plausible -- I associate the em-dash with old books and stilted prose, like Sherlock Holmes stories