<3 — <3

AI loves the em-dash, and Sean Goedecke thinks he’s found out why after exploring a lot of fun theories I had not heard of (including AI trainers in East Africa being fond of the punctuation): modern models are trained on a ton of freshly digitized 19th- and early-20th-century books, back when writers used dashes like it was their job. GPT-3.5 didn’t do this; GPT-4o does. Blame the OCR.