The em dash — a single punctuation mark that has long divided writers and grammar purists — has recently taken on a new reputation, one tied less to style than to suspicion.
Read also: The birth of 🙂 : How the first digital smiley was invented.
«I love the em dash — too bad AI does too,» journalist Mihika Agarwal wrote, pointing to a growing online perception that the punctuation mark has become a telltale sign of machine-generated text.
Recently, she noted, internet discourse has increasingly framed frequent use of em dashes as evidence of authorship by large language models. A loose, almost unspoken consensus has emerged: heavy reliance on the mark is no longer seen as a human stylistic choice but as a signal of artificial intelligence. Writers who continue to favor it risk being labeled accordingly.
Read also: Kazakh President is lambasting his own government over Grok and ChatGPT.
The irony, Agarwal argues, is that em dashes are deeply embedded in the very material used to train AI systems. They appear throughout books, essays and articles — all written by humans who use them to signal pauses, add nuance or extend a thought. AI did not create the em dash; it absorbed it from existing writing.
Even at a glance, the em dash stands apart, offering a cleaner and more expressive alternative to strings of commas or ellipses. In a digital landscape saturated with content, Agarwal suggests, it remains a tool that naturally draws attention and shapes the rhythm of a sentence.
