I really miss using em dashes in my writing. Ever since content creators started using ChatGPT to help (or supplement) their writing, em dashes have become indicators of AI use. Students are routinely caught with their pants down as professors flag an essay as AI-generated based on the presence of lists, positive-leaning prose, and em dashes.

Em dashes can be found everywhere across my personal and professional writing. Nowadays, I find myself avoiding em dashes because I’m afraid that my writing will be flagged as AI-generated and dismissed as slop. I feel like I have to “dumb down” aspects of writing to convince readers that the words they are skimming were, in fact, written by a human. In turn, this results in this sort of meta-game where I choose my words carefully—typically ensuring that I include the right amount of grammatical character and/or mistakes—to convince readers that they aren’t wasting their time reading slop on the internet. Writing these two em dashes felt suspicious because I’m trying to insert them into my writing where readers will least expect ChatGPT to add them.

I’m curious (and more than a bit worried) that the writing that is being produced these days is being shaped by LLMs, even if an LLM has never touched a particular piece of prose. We are all collectively aware of what slop “feels like” to read, and that means that serious writers are conscious of how their word choice, punctuation, and flow are perceived by readers. The resulting piece of writing has therefore been shaped by the mere presence of consumer-grade LLMs.

The worst part is that models like ChatGPT can change between models; a new foundation model might drop that over-uses something else, like semi-colons, leading to future articles/books/papers/reports/etc avoiding its use to avoid arousing suspicion. As a software engineer, I love LLMs, but I’m unhappy with the amount of soft power they have on the creatives of the world, especially online. If an em dash fits into one’s writing but they avoid using it out of fear, our AI overlords have won.