AI Has a Punctuation Addiction. It's Called the Em Dash, and You've Seen It a Thousand Times Today.

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If you've read anything written by AI in the last three years, you've seen it.

The em dash.

That long horizontal line that shows up in the middle of sentences, adding what feels like dramatic emphasis or a parenthetical aside. It looks like this: "AI is transforming industries, but the real question is whether society is ready for it."

“The em dash is a perfectly fine punctuation mark. Emily Dickinson loved it. So did David Foster Wallace. The problem isn't the em dash itself. The problem is that AI uses it the way a nervous speaker uses 'um': constantly, reflexively, in places where a comma, colon, or period would work better. When every other sentence contains an em dash, the text starts to read like a fingerprint.”