I still think about the feedback I got on one of my first history essays in high school: “good writing, but you rely too much on semi-colons and em dashes.” It was true — I overused these punctuation marks, and though I have regulated them since coming to college, they remain integral to my personal style. There is one problem: generative AI has that exact same tendency.
Due to humanity’s general overuse of em dashes, Language Learning Models, or LLMs, have latched onto these delightful punctuation marks, and in some cases, refused to let them go. On Medium, Brent Csutoras wrote that the em dash is “baked into their DNA,” to the point that ChatGPT had trouble removing it from its responses even when explicitly told not to include them.
I have seen countless comments on Instagram and Twitter talking about the em dash — and to my surprise and disappointment, most people already completely associate it with AI. In a Twitter post, user @atlanticesque wrote: “The em dash used to have such charming connotations…but now it just suggests LLM use.”
Joel Stein told a similar story in the Wall Street Journal about how a source told her son an administrative school email was written by AI, when, in fact, the only evidence that source had to back that up was the fact they used em dashes. The email turned out not to be AI-generated.
The point is, the relationship between AI and em dashes is not going to leave anytime soon. Even if it is the most versatile form of punctuation, taking the form of commas, colons or parentheses, we have started to concede this brilliant language invention to something we created.
Think: why does AI use em dashes so often? Is it because of its versatility? No, it is because of its humanity.
It seems obvious, but AI trains on human writing. If it uses em dashes often, so do we (or at least we did, many years ago). The idea of letting the em dash go because of AI is equivalent to a joke being ruined by your younger sibling: we created it, thought it was clever, but as soon as someone outside of our group uses it, it is dead.
Language and structure constantly change; there is no denying that. But the way AI is pushing us out of our own writing styles is an unnatural shift, one that is abrupt and jarring. Should I alter my entire essay structure based on the fact that someone might think my writing is AI? Maybe I should, but I refuse to relent on something so valuable as a writer.
This entire idea might seem too over-the-top and dramatic – after all, this is just a piece of punctuation. That is a fair opinion, but AI is not going to stop taking our trademarks and making them its own. Soon enough, writers who use three clauses in their sentence joined by a conjunction and a semicolon will be the target of “obvious AI indicators.”
Sometimes I hear the opinion that we are just like AI, in the sense that we train on our own data and lived experiences, and act according to the world. If a human can learn how to draw from an art teacher, who’s to say a machine cannot?
There is one thing that we have, though, that AI does not: innovation. AI can train all it wants on art and writing, but it will never create something completely and utterly new. It will never be the next Virginia Woolf or the next Leonardo da Vinci, and it will never add significant artistic advancements to our culture.
Humans add. We made the em dash, and we continue to experiment to create new ways of conveying, interpreting and viewing information. Only we can change culture positively – all AI does is ride on our coattails.
