Irony an article written by AI, wants to say do not use AI for writing. Following sentence looks like written by an AI, human do not use double dash, it seems AI instead of emdash wrote double dash;
“I think you should almost never use AI to write -- that is, to do the thing you’re doing when you type words on a page -- whether for a blog post, a research report, a memo,”
This absolutely doesn't look like AI writing and this is a pretty weird signal to use.
I have a much better theory: as it happens, Substack automatically converts "--" to em-dash as you type. I'm guessing the author knew that and wanted to use this feature, but composed the article in another editor and then copied-and-pasted the whole thing. Because of how Substack implements the feature, the substitution doesn't actually kick in on Ctrl-V, so all these "--" remained in place.
Haha, I do actually use double dash, as I write in org-mode. I then convert that org-mode text to Markdown and copy and paste the Markdown into the Substack editor, which preserves the double dash. In case it needs to be said, the article is 100% human-written.
In some of your other writing can see use of emdash probably thats also intentional, emacs might have very special key combo for it to use unicode emdash instead of ASCII “-“. I commented about double dash (“--“) because because thats what LLM does when asked not to use emdash for writing.
“Another promising approach is to conduct on-site inspections regularly—say, every six months— to make sure chips are not just installed to fool inspectors and then removed and smuggled, as has happened before. However, conducting on-site inspections at this scale would likely require additional budget for export enforcement, or for US authorities to implement a third-party export auditor program.”
Yes, for that newsletter, where I write in my day job as a policy researcher, we use em dashes. For my personal writing (example: https://www.lesswrong.com/users/erich_grunewald), I use double dashes.
Double dash has long been the way to clearly indicate in plain ASCII text an em dash as distinct from a simple hyphen. So I think the author here is here emphatically reclaiming the use of the em dash while pointedly not using the Unicode character so beloved by LLMs.