The Em Dash Witch Hunt

The AI police are out in full force on social media, scanning for clues.

They're on the hunt for signs of machine-generated content. And at the top of their most-wanted list?

The em dash.

You know the one—longer than a hyphen, bolder than a comma, softer than a full stop. It’s a bridge between thoughts, a pause with purpose, a way to say, this part matters—pay attention!

Humans have been using em dashes for centuries. Long before AI ever strung two words together.

Writers like Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, and Charles Dickens frequently used em dashes to create pauses, add emphasis, and shape the rhythm of their prose.

ChatGPT loves them. And suddenly, that’s a problem.

We don't trust words that might have been assembled by a machine. No one wants to take advice from an algorithm. We’d rather get a book recommendation from a stranger on Reddit than from ChatGPT or Gemini.

Humans bring lived experience to their writing. They’ve stayed up late finishing an essay, argued over its meaning, wrestled with its ideas. AI doesn’t wrestle with anything. It doesn’t feel disappointment at a bad ending or feel joy after penning a perfect phrase. It just predicts what should come next.

The moment content loses its human fingerprints, it loses its soul. That's why engineers train their AI models to sound more human. It's why chatbots use casual language and AI voices add imperfections.

We don’t just want good advice, we want it to feel like it came from a human.

And that’s why the em dash is under attack. Writers are already stripping them from their prose to avoid suspicion.

Writing used to be about leaving an impact on your readers.

Now, we also need to prove we're human.