Many good writers used the em dash long before LLMs. (Where, after all, did LLMs get the idea from?)

Em dashes —once the sign of a sophisticated writer— were prominent in The New York Times.

s/sophisticated writer/Mac user. It was a pain to type them on Windows so most people just used the regular dash - accessible on any keyboard.

I had no idea! I was a typesetter, we would have to manually create them using keyboard shortcuts on both systems.

Microsoft word would add them for you long before AI

Entering two dashes on the iOS keyboard inserts an emdash, I would use them frequently when I had an iPhone.

Yeah, but when an article is already giving off slop vibes, it's more evidence that the article is slop.

AI code is great - but it has compilers and linters and tests. I'm sure someone will figure out a writing workflow that doesn't produce slop, but I ain't seen it yet

I'm not sure what sentence fragments you're referring to (I didn't see any in the initial pass) but em dashes have been characteristic of Derek's work since we'll before the commercialization of LLMs

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/10/job-...

He said, forgetting he was signed into an account with Derek spelled the same way.

Fun fact, there are actually multiple people with the first name Derek. I post under my real name, so if you want to confirm I'm not Derek Thompson (or Derek Jeter for that matter), you can look me up on LinkedIn or the WhitePages. I'm the only Derek Tank out there