Death of the Em Dash

Behold, the em dash: —

If you don't know what they are, here's what Wikipedia has to say about dashes:

The dash is a punctuation mark consisting of a long horizontal line. It is similar in appearance to the hyphen but is longer and sometimes higher from the baseline. The most common versions are the en dash –, generally longer than the hyphen but shorter than the minus sign; the em dash —, longer than either the en dash or the minus sign; and the horizontal bar ―, whose length varies across typefaces but tends to be between those of the en and em dashes.[a]

The em dash is typically used to indicate a pause in speech. However, they are surprisingly shrouded in controversy:

Some people think that other traditional punctuation is clearer and less disruptive.
They are inconsistently used; some uses have adjacent spaces, some do not.
They aren't on standard keyboards and are therefore harder to type.

Despite all this, they are still widely used in literature. I myself am an avid em dash user (although I've tried my best to avoid using them in this article so far). However, more recently, a somewhat unexpected issue threatens the em dash's popularity.

Generative AI

It's no secret that ChatGPT loves em dashes. Here's a LinkedIn post from OpenAI:

(Source: LinkedIn)

Now, here are some of the comments:

The ultimate telltale of someone’s blindly using AI. This and random words in bold 😅. The new credibility breaker!

I actively remove em dashes and comments in code. Dead giveaways.

Yeah this is a huge turn off as they don't teach this in schools so rarely used so everytime it was A.I generated.

I always edit mine to remove them because of this.

Suddenly, it's not looking good for em dashes. If they come across that suspiciously, then I'm sure at least some people will actively try to avoid or limit their use. I would be surprised if academic institutions don't see fluctuating em dash usage. I'd really like to see the statistics—are students using AI so much that overall usage goes up, or are they deliberately avoiding them, causing a downturn?

The title of this article is almost certainly an exaggeration, but it is interesting to think about the cultural impact of small things that otherwise go unnoticed. The topic also speaks to a broader question: just how much is our use of AI changing the way we write?