It’s rare that a punctuation mark becomes grist for the online rumor mill. But recently, an uptick in focus on AI and its impacts has brought a Blake Lively-esque level of attention to the em dash, named for the footprint of the capital M and used to break up sentences, introduce clauses, mimic interrupted speech and more. The em dash is already quite accustomed to controversy, with a long history of charming and bedeviling authors, journalists and academics. It’s the black licorice of dashes: Those who like it love it; those who don’t will loudly and repeatedly let you know. But the emergence of a third faction — those who have suspicions of the em dash — puts a new spotlight on one of punctuation’s perennial hot topics.
It’s the black licorice of dashes: Those who like it love it; those who don’t will loudly and repeatedly let you know.
Conjecture about ChatGPT’s apparent addiction to the em dash has been percolating online for months. Posts in Reddit’s r/ChatGPT ask, “Has anyone noticed how ChatGPT tends to use em dashes frequently?” and “Is an em dash (—) proof of AI manipulation?” OpenAI’s developer community debates the “em dash habit” of its flagship product. Second and third-hand stories about professors accusing well-punctuated assignments of AI assistance spread like urban legends.
In the past few weeks, things have gotten hectic for the em dash. Tech-business headlines have warned against “the telltale sign that you used ChatGPT.” A viral Instagram reel posted by LuxeGen (“Gen Z’s go-to source of fashion, beauty, life advice & pop culture”) featured two young influencers roasting a fashion brand whose use of “the ChatGPT hyphen” stained their branding with AI cringe. Reddit posts have taken on a frantic tone (“ChatGPT has ruined the em dash forever”). And this isn’t conspiracy territory, either. Users report that ChatGPT regularly ignores directives to exclude em dashes from generated text; per one member of the OpenAI developer community, “I will even remind ChatGPT not to use it and it will agree, and then do it immediately again.” (No means no, ChatGPT!)
These attacks on the em dash — a ChatGPT hyphen? How very dare you! — have in turn blazed across social media spaces populated by the kind of folks who will tell you, unprompted, that they have a favorite punctuation mark and what it is. (It is very likely the em dash.) The fact that no one has stepped forward with a firsthand account of false accusation is immaterial because the em dash drama plays on existing anxieties. People who work with words for a living have heard for years that artificial intelligence is coming for our jobs; co-optation of em dashes means we’re one step closer to obsolescence.
Em dashes are among the most writerly of punctuation marks precisely because they don’t really need to be there. Unlike periods and commas, em dashes aren’t integral to sentence structure; they’re a considered choice that can, but by no means have to, take the place of commas, parentheses and semicolons. They are deployed for pauses and interruptions in speech; they precede bursts of exposition, neat summings-up and lengthy tangents. In internal and external dialogue, they can convey impatience, distraction, delirium, ecstasy. They aren’t always dramatic, but they are decidedly extra.
Work in progress (J Studios/Getty Images)
These attacks on the em dash — a ChatGPT hyphen? How very dare you! — have in turn blazed across social media spaces populated by the kind of folks who will tell you, unprompted, that they have a favorite punctuation mark and what it is. (It is very likely the em dash.)
Accordingly, many writers have made style-defining use of them. In the poems of Emily Dickinson, em dashes signpost alertness and urgency as they halt sentences and leave readers hanging at the ends of lines, hoping for a resolution. James Joyce’s “Ulysses” rained em dashes on winding sentences that he had already stripped of quotation marks, resulting in prose so unruly that numerous reading groups are devoted specifically to parsing it. Vladimir Nabokov flexed on both of them by using em dashes between other em dashes.
And writers’ enthusiasm for em dashes is often hard-won, given that plenty of editors and readers would be happy to vanquish those ostentatious marks from the page entirely. Strunk and White’s “The Elements of Style” recommends restraint with what it calls “a dash,” cautioning that it should be used “only when a more common mark of punctuation seems inadequate.” Random House vice president, executive managing editor, and copy chief Benjamin Dreyer, in his contemporary style handbook “Dreyer’s English,” broaches the topic by writing tartly: “Likely you don’t need much advice from me on how to use em dashes, because you all seem to use an awful lot of them.” Overdashing New York Times writers were publicly rebuked by standards editor Philip B. Corbett in a 2011 post on the outlet’s blog that clocked a single-day total of 16 dashes on A1 alone. Even Dickinson’s dashes were erased from early publications of her work by editors who assumed readers would find them confusing.
So if large language models demonstrate a preference for em dashes, it’s because they have been trained on books and other writing whose authors embraced them first. The idea that AI adoption could unwittingly recast any single piece of punctuation as a literal mark of fraudulence seems like an unbearable irony. The arrival of AI in our lives without introduction or permission brings with it fears about human endangerment; coming together to defend what we fear losing is an act of solidarity whether it’s macro (say, nationwide protests against an undemocratic political regime) or decidedly micro (declaring on Bluesky that ChatGPT “can pry my em dashes from my cold dead hands”). Defiance is a rational response to tech businesses urging us to prioritize the use of tools meant to replace our work and welcome their most bizarre and dystopian interventions.
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The fact that educators and students are allegedly the groups most suspicious of ChatGPT’s fondness for em dashes also makes inherent, if depressing, sense. The United States has seen a steady decline in literacy in recent decades; high school and college students are less likely to read for fun, and once-robust elementary-education standards for grammar and reading comprehension have been stripped down to better teach to the test. On the upside, kids no longer have to spend hours of their wild and precious lives diagramming sentences. On the downside: Pretty much everything else.
If large language models demonstrate a preference for em dashes, it’s because they have been trained on books and other writing whose authors embraced them first.
But the current em dash discourse is evidence that AI hasn’t made original writing obsolete just yet. So what if some Gen Z influencers see a venti hyphen where you see a proud, versatile dash? It’s not as though the em dash is the first punctuation mark to get lost in intergenerational translation. The stalwart period has been stigmatized in text messages as an expression of simmering fury for years. But most of us still recognize that they’re the most useful way to end a sentence.
And really, what’s to stop the em dash’s sudden shadiness from becoming an illuminating glow? Accusations of AI use are concerning, sure, but couldn’t they also result in a grammatical Streisand effect of people learning about or becoming reacquainted with the multipurpose mark? Maybe what doesn’t kill a keystroke makes it stronger. In any case, humans are likely to have the last word on the em dash, if only because we’ll never shut up about it.
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