Pop CulturePop Culture Stop AI-Shaming Our Precious, Kindly Em Dashes—Please Human writers have always used the em dash. In fact, it’s the most human punctuation mark there is. Getty Images/Ringer illustration
By Brian Phillips Aug. 20, 12:00 pm UTC • 7 min
I stand before you today with violence in my heart. I do not come in peace. I come to obliterate, disparage, and destroy. In this fallen world of ours, there exist certain ideas that must be annihilated before goodness can flourish. I am here to rain holy fire upon one of those ideas, and I am here to do so in the name of a punctuation mark.
The punctuation mark in question is the em dash. The idea—the terrible, mistaken idea—is that the use of em dashes in a piece of writing is a sign that the text was generated by AI. Some people have been saying this on, guess where, the internet. The implication is that human writers should avoid em dashes for fear of being mistaken for chatbots. No. Wrong. I am here to raze this implication to the very ground and salt the earth where it stood.
You're familiar, I hope, with the em dash? I speak of the elegant, elongated hyphen, the gentle friend and ally of all writers, used to set off a chunk of text within a sentence. It looks like this: —. Notice, please, how gracious it is, how welcoming, like an outstretched arm guiding you over a tricky step. It can be used in so many different ways. Perhaps you start a thought and—because thoughts don't always move in perfectly straight lines—find that you need to modify the thought with another thought before you finish it. Perhaps you reach the end of a thought and want to emphasize your conclusion—an em dash can do it. Perhaps you simply wish to mark a pause—a hitch, a breath—in the flow of your thinking. The em dash can be annoying when overused, sure. But when it's used well, it's as flexible and subtle as the turns of thought itself.
Yet for months, the em dash has been the victim of a relentless campaign of online persecution the likes of which no punctuation mark, not even the semicolon, has ever seen. Any chucklehead who disagrees with an online post can, if that post happens to include an em dash, dismiss it with the claim that it was written by a chatbot. It's gotten so bad that people on random subreddits are having to issue PSAs informing their fellow users that em dashes were not invented by ChatGPT. These people are heroes of our time. Normally I'm an enthusiastic advocate of AI-shaming, but I will not stand idly by while you make the em dash a pawn in your dirty game of bot-spotting.
As with many modern plagues, the theory that em dashes belong to the machines has a disputed origin. Some people say it began with a racist-seeming X post. Others say it started on the ChatGPT subreddit. Still others suggest the trend was noticed by people working on AI detection tools, or trying to eliminate bot-spawned slop from forums. Wherever it came from, the theory seems to have started going viral around this past February—objectively the dumbest month, a time when no one should try to have thoughts, much less broadcast them—and soon, em dash discourse was convulsing the internet.
There are two reasons why this discourse must be stopped: The first has to do with the way generative AI works; the second has to do with the fate of the human soul. Let's take them one by one.
First, generative AI. I haven't seen any hard evidence that chatbots, in practice, use more em dashes than anyone else. Anecdotally, people say it's hard to get them to stop using em dashes; you can order an AI agent to generate text without dashes, and it might still put dashes in the text it generates. But that only proves that AI chatbots suck, not that human writers use em dashes less frequently.
I can understand why lots of people seized on the idea of a simple AI detection filter. You recognize a vampire because it can't enter your house without an invitation; it would be handy, at a moment when language is suddenly being produced at enormous scale by unthinking machines, to have a similar rubric for text. But looking to em dashes to play this role is like claiming you can identify vampires because they wear black clothes. You're going to confuse a lot of humans for vampires, and you're going to trust a lot of vampires by mistake.
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