AI Is Stealing Our Em Dashes

Grammar nerds, brace yourselves—AI isn't just stealing creative jobs, it's stealing em dashes. The Guardian's James Shackell writes that an editor recently told him to get rid of all the em dashes from his writing because "people assume that means it's written by AI," which put him in the strange position of defending his favorite piece of punctuation. Thanks to chatbots like ChatGPT, the em dash—a humble dash the length of a capital M in a certain font—has become one of the stylistic tells of AI, and writers like Shackell are being forced to rethink their natural flow just to avoid sounding algorithmic. "Why couldn't machines have embraced the semicolon?" he pondered. "No one gives a fig about those."

Turns out the reason is ironically due to how much humans love em dashes and how AI models learn from our writing. "Humans used [em dashes] so often that AIs learned them as a default natural flow," wrote Medium's Brent Csutoras. "It's like asking a bird not to chirp." In other words, models trained on massive corpora internalized these stylistic quirks and now use them to seem more human. Meanwhile, when humans use them now, they risk being flagged as a machine. But Shackell explains the em dash is just the best way to write how he thinks. "A person's writing often reflects how their brain works, and mine (when it works) tends to work in fits and starts. My thoughts don't arrive in perfectly rendered prose, so I don't write them down that way."

As things stand, writers are caught mid-shift between preserving their voice and dodging AI accusations. Some may stubbornly retain dashes; others will abandon them in favor of less controversial punctuation. But the broader fear is that AI won't just mimic style—it might silently narrow expressive range by policing what looks human. Shackell writes: "It seems I have two choices now—keep using em dashes with a sort of stubborn, curmudgeonly pride until all my clients stop exchanging money for words, or start writing incredibly long run-on sentences, like this, with commas all over the place…and maybe ellipses too; ideas connected by semicolons. Staccato flow. Full stops everywhere. Nope, that sucks too."