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.

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✅ 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.

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💡 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?

The illiterate flocking to Lemmy to profess that they don’t know how to make em dashes, therefore it’s AI

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Apparently there’s even an en dash and a hyphen.

The English language is so fucked.

Another take:

She feels bad about it, wrote a incoherant babbling mess of run-on sentences and incoherant rants about your relationship, she then re-read it and found it to be disproportionately mean and possibly hurtful, She then shoved it all into an LLM and prompted:

I’m breaking up with my boyfriend. This is all my natural heartfelt take on the situation <inserts text>, but I find the tone to be callous, angry, and hurtful. Can you please reword this to make the reader feel less attacked, possibly up to and including removing grievances, but at the same time making it clear that this decision is final and that I’d like to part ways amicably, and also that he’s not getting his dog back.

I use em dashes and emojis all the time. OMG, am I AI?

I actually like using em dashes because it’s the correct thing to do. Also the Oxford comma, correct use of semi colon, and listing things in threes.

As if breaking up over text isn’t bad enough by itself.

Every user of the em dash on the planet is in this comment section.

For me, it would take some of the sting out of the break-up.

I would think to myself, “damn, how did I not realize that I was dating a lazy moron?”

I’m a markdown nerd who likes to use headers to break up longer post and sometimes properly buletpoint or put ASCII art in preformatted boxes. People who thinks they have the magic sauce on LLM generation detection because a post goes out of their way to do more than the bre minimum with punctuation or formatting is an asshole.

Many input mechanisms automatically substitute two hyphens with “–”.

I use them all the time!

Hasn’t word done this simce about offoce 2007? the autoformat as you type feature, specifically…

I only know this because I fucking hate it and have been religiously turning it off

Bullet successfully Dodged, Anon.