I use them – well, mostly en dashes because that's the custom where I'm from – because I'm a bit of a typography nerd and have grown to dislike the barrenness of ASCII.
In this case Apple has cared about typography since its very beginning. Steve Jobs obsessed over it. The OS also replaces simple quotes with fancier ones.
I do the same on my websites. It's embedded into my static site generator.
Not long ago, a statistical study found that AI almost always has an 'e' in its output. It is a firm indicator of AI slop. If you catch a post with an 'e', pay it no mind: it's probably AI.
Uh-oh. Caught you. Bang to rights! That post is firmly AI. Bad. Nobody should mind your robot posts.
I'm incredibly impressed that you managed to make that whole message without a single usage of the most frequently used letter, except in your quotations.
Such omission is a hobby of many WWW folk. I can, in fact, think back to finding a community on R*ddit known as "AVoid5", which had this trial as its main point.
I did ask G'mini for synonyms. And to do a cursory count of e's in my post. Just as a 2nd opinion. It found only glyphs with quotation marks around it. It graciously put forward a proxy for that: "the fifth letter".
It's not oft that you run into such alluring confirmation of your point.
My first post took around 6 min & a dictionary. This post took 3. It's a quick skill.
No LLMs. Ctrl+f shows you all your 'e's without switching away from this tab. (And why count it? How many is not important, you can simply look if any occur and that's it)
