Thanks AI, You Ruined the Em Dash

 •  1 min read

An em dash is the long ”—” punctuation character. And whenever an online post includes one, there’s always someone who replies with “Em dash detected”, implying the text was written by AI.

I use AI every day. I don’t mind anyone knowing that. But if I write something myself, I just don’t want people to assume I pasted it from a generative AI response.

Maybe I’m concerned that the mere suspicion becomes a distraction from the actual content. Or that it somehow invalidates the effort I put into writing it. I’m not exactly sure why I care. I just do.

So now I’ve been avoiding the em dash in most of my writing. I guess we just use other punctuation instead. Or rewrite our sentences. All to avoid looking like AI.

Which is kind of funny when you think about it. Humans are now changing the way they write, because they’re afraid of sounding like software that learned how humans write.

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Written by Tom Herni

A front-end engineer passionate about designing and building creative solutions for the web.