I started using the em dash sometime around 2024. Not because I read a style guide, and definitely not because a chatbot taught me — I’d just got my first laptop the year before, in my second semester of college, and somewhere in all that typing the long dash quietly crept in. It looked beautiful to me. It still does.
Which turned out to be terrible timing, because right around then the internet decided the em dash was a sign of AI.
So let me be clear up front: this isn’t a love letter. I save that word for the exclamation mark, which I overuse to an embarrassing degree1 — that confession is a post for another day. This is just a defense. The em dash did nothing wrong.
An em dash is the long one: —. It’s exactly one em wide, and an em is simply the current font size — so the dash grows and shrinks with your type (nine points wide in 9-point text, and so on) [1]Wikipedia · Dash — Em dash. The unit is named after the capital M, whose metal type was historically about that wide [2]Matthew Butterick · Hyphens and Dashes · Practical Typography. In Unicode it lives at U+2014; in HTML it’s — [1]Wikipedia · Dash — Em dash.
A tale of three dashes
Most of the “is this AI?” panic comes from people who never learned that there are three different dashes, each with a job. Here’s the family:
Glues words together: well-known, state-of-the-art, check-in. It lives inside compound words and never takes a space.
Spans ranges: pages 10–20, Mon–Fri, the 2024–25 season. Think of it as the word “to”.
And then there’s the em dash — the longest, the most dramatic, and the one I reach for most. It stands in for a colon, a pair of parentheses, or a hard comma: a pause where a full stop feels too final and a comma too weak [1]Wikipedia · Dash — Em dash. It lets a sentence breathe, pause, and then — turn.
How I actually picked it up
No dramatic origin story here. It’s a recent habit, and an honest one2:
Second semester of college. For the first time I was typing everything, all day long.
No grand reason — the em dash just started showing up in my writing because it looked right.
The internet brands the em dash a sign of AI. Suddenly I'm seeing the accusation everywhere.
Defending a habit I picked up for how it looks — not from a bot.
How I actually type it
Here’s one small tell that I’m not a language model: I know the keyboard shortcut by heart — and the way I type it changed when my operating system did.
The double hyphen I keep losing
Sometimes I don’t even want the polished em dash. A plain -- looks honest and a little defiant, and it turns up naturally in code and in CLI flags like --verbose. -- just looks cool3.
There’s real history here: back when keyboards and ASCII had no em dash, people faked it with two hyphens --, and some publishers used three --- — letting one, two, and three hyphens stand in for the hyphen, en dash, and em dash respectively [1]Wikipedia · Dash — Em dash. Markdown inherited exactly that convention, which is why most parsers quietly rewrite -- into an en dash and --- into an em dash before I get a say.
I cannot bring myself to hate the em dash. So when the parser eats my -- against my will, I redirect all of that frustration at the Markdown parser instead. It’s the only fair target — the dash is innocent.
(For the record: the only reason you can see a literal -- in this very post is that I wrapped it in code, where the parser isn’t allowed to touch it.)
So why does everyone think it’s AI?
None of this used to be controversial. Then, in April 2025, Rolling Stone reported on a growing belief that the em dash is a fingerprint of AI writing — ChatGPT especially. The idea caught fire on social media, where people started calling it the “ChatGPT hyphen” and advising each other to drop it to sound more human [4]Wikipedia · Dash — Usage in AI-generated text [5]Telegraph India · Dash it! Have chatbots fallen for the em dash? Writers, scholars debate AI's telltale signs · 2025. Plenty of writers pushed back, defending the dash as a perfectly human mark with centuries of history behind it [6]The Ringer · The Em Dash, AI, and the New Suspicion Around Punctuation · 2025 [7]The Daily Dot · How the em dash became a signal of AI writing · 2025.
My favourite explanation comes from New York Times Magazine editor Nitsuh Abebe, who suggested the suspicion is really about unfamiliarity: our writing has drifted from carefully edited prose toward quick emails and texts, so a mark that used to be ordinary now reads as suspiciously deliberate [8]The New York Times Magazine · ChatGPT, the dash, and how we write now · 2025.
An OpenAI spokesperson has noted that while ChatGPT does tend to favour the em dash, that leaning depends on the prompt — and it isn’t a reliable sign of machine authorship either way [4]Wikipedia · Dash — Usage in AI-generated text.
There’s something a little sad in all of it. A perfectly good mark — one writers have leaned on for centuries — is being quietly retired by association.
If the em dash is proof of AI, then Emily Dickinson was the original language model. Her poems are stitched together almost entirely out of dashes [9]Emily Dickinson Museum · Major Characteristics of Dickinson's Poetry — and for decades her editors quietly “corrected” them into tidy commas and full stops [10]Literary Hub · How Much Editing Was Done to Emily Dickinson's Poems After She Died? · 2018, certain they knew better [11]Harvard Review · The Auction of the Mind: Editing Emily Dickinson · 2016. Sound familiar? We’re doing the same thing again, only now we blame a chatbot instead of an editor.
Why I won’t stop
I’m not going to ration a punctuation mark to win an argument with a vibe. The em dash earns its place: it holds two thoughts apart while keeping them in the same breath. Nothing else does that quite as well.
I’d rather be mistaken for a careful machine than write carelessly to prove I’m human.
So I’ll keep using it — deliberately, and with full knowledge of the Unicode code point. If that makes me sound like a robot, it’s only because the robots learned it from people who loved it first.
References & further reading
- Wikipedia. “Dash — Em dash.”
- Matthew Butterick. “Hyphens and Dashes.” Practical Typography.
- Apple StackExchange. “How to type a long em dash.”
- Wikipedia. “Dash — Usage in AI-generated text.”
- Telegraph India. “Dash it! Have chatbots fallen for the em dash? Writers, scholars debate AI's telltale signs.” 2025.
- The Ringer. “The Em Dash, AI, and the New Suspicion Around Punctuation.” 2025.
- The Daily Dot. “How the em dash became a signal of AI writing.” 2025.
- The New York Times Magazine. “ChatGPT, the dash, and how we write now.” 2025.
- Emily Dickinson Museum. “Major Characteristics of Dickinson's Poetry.”
- Literary Hub. “How Much Editing Was Done to Emily Dickinson's Poems After She Died?” 2018.
- Harvard Review. “The Auction of the Mind: Editing Emily Dickinson.” 2016.