How AI panic turned the em dash into a villain (and why history makes that hilarious)
We live in strange times.
Look around you. Everywhere you turn, there it is. The dreaded em dash. Billboards. LinkedIn thought-leadership posts. Even TikTok captions aren’t immune. Brand websites promising to:
“Redefine the future — one disruptive solution at a time.”
Once beloved by literary types and copywriters alike, the em dash has recently become the typographical scapegoat of our time. A red flag. A dead giveaway. “A dead giveaway of what?” I hear you not asking. The em dash has become the “AI tell”, if you will. Writers and editors are now side-eyeing each other’s punctuation like it’s a secret code for “generated by ChatGPT.”
Yes, the em dash has become the scarlet letter of punctuation. Apparently, if you use an em dash in 2025, you must be a bot.
The internet has collectively decided that any usage of the em dash = ChatGPT, and ChatGPT = lazy, formulaic, mass-produced content in what has, in recent times, been dubbed “AI slop.”
What this means is that if your content has even one single em dash in it, apparently it came from the same soulless factory as AI-generated e-books about fad diets and crypto-based “side hustles”.
The Slopocalypse Is Upon Us
To be clear: AI does overuse em dashes. In my opinion, it’s the punctuation equivalent of jazz hands. If you ask an LLM model to draft content for you, odds are you’ll get something like:
“We’re not just a service — we’re a movement.
We don’t follow trends — we start them.
And when we say strategy — we mean you.
Not just a product — a lifestyle.
Not just a team — a family.
Not just coffee — a way of life.”
Our recently-developed dependency on LLMs has resulted in an abundance of cookie-cutter content. Stylish. Polished. And slightly lobotomised. This has given rise to what I’m dubbing the “AI Slopocalypse”. It’s the age where a thousand AI-generated blog posts bloom overnight, all beginning with “In today’s fast-paced world…” and ending with “the future is now.” That’s the Slopocalypse.
As a result of this, if people see an em dash, suddenly it’s a crime scene. There’s yellow tape around the paragraph. Someone brings out the forensic toolkit and starts swabbing for machine learning residue.
“This can’t have been drafted by a human. There’s an em dash and a punchy subheader.”
So when readers see an em dash, they pounce: “Aha! Machine!”
As though Virginia Woolf wasn’t slinging dashes long before chatbots showed up.
As though Emily Dickinson wasn’t practically married to the thing.
They see one long horizontal line and are immediately on a call to the literary police. This has led to many disgruntled writers and em dash enthusiasts, who have expressed disdain over the whole “em dash = AI” debacle.
I digress.
Let’s talk about how we got here. Let’s talk about why the em dash became the scapegoat, why people now scorn punctuation like superstitious villagers confronting a black cat.
How the Em Dash Became the Villain
The em dash has gone mainstream. It’s become the athleisure of punctuation: comfortable, forgiving, and alarmingly acceptable at nice restaurants.
This is not solely the machine’s fault. We did this. We sprinted to chatbots for everything from “write my brand manifesto” to “I need a cute caption for this photo of a salad I ordered.” We then pasted the results straight into the world, unedited, like forgetting to remove the price tag from a gift and also the gift is a parrot that keeps repeating “whether you’re X or Y.”
Large language models like ChatGPT learned to write by studying our collective output: books, articles, websites, marketing copy, bad tweets, the whole mess.
They noticed a pattern: when humans want to sound conversational-yet-smart, we use em dashes. A lot. So the AI did what AI does: it copied us. Then, because it’s a probability machine, it copied us too much.
Even when you beg it not to —
even when you threaten it with death —
it still sneaks them in.
And not just em dashes. The AI also fell in love with certain sentence structures:
“No X. No Y. Just Z.”
“Whether you’re A or B, we C.”
“From X to Y, we’ve got Z.”
“Here’s what you need to know.”
“Let’s dive in.”
“As we’ll explore below.”
If I had a dollar for every time I’ve read something like that, I’d buy Twitter back from Musk (I refuse to call it X) and give it back to the birds.
The machines did not invent this, we did. It learned from thousands of resources. You cannot train a parrot on ship songs and then complain it sings at sea.
It’s not originality. It’s math. The machine is basically doing statistical karaoke, drawing from decades of content.
But people don’t care about that nuance. They see an em dash, roll their eyes, and scream “AI sludge!” before scrolling back to their algorithmic TikTok feeds. “If I see an em dash, I know it’s AI” is a bit like concluding that anyone in a black turtleneck is Steve Jobs.
Here’s an inconvenient truth:
A great deal of the “I can always tell it’s AI” brigade is also the “I haven’t opened a book since I was in high school” brigade. Their literary diet is tweets, social media captions, and Reddit frontpage headlines.
So now, the mere sight of a long sentence with actual punctuation sends them into fits. The em dash’s length becomes a spotlight for suspicion. Never mind the content, tone, argument, or voice. That long line? Robot. Case closed.
And yet, history laughs at our suffering. Because once upon a time, punctuation reached a level of absurdity modern AI can only dream of. As bad as AI’s overuse of em dashes is, and how this contributes to the Slopocalypse, we should consider ourselves lucky, because it could be so much worse. Brace yourselves.
Behold: The Dog’s Bollocks
Picture it: the year is 1887. Queen Victoria is still alive. Everyone’s wearing wool. And some well-meaning grammarian decides the best way to introduce a list is with a colon and a dash. Like this:
Here are your choices:—
Tea
Toast
Mild emotional repression
Why did they do this? Nobody knows. Possibly for emphasis. Possibly because no one had invented bullet points yet. Either way, it caught on (particularly in British printing) where it quickly earned the nickname “the dog’s bollocks,” because it looked… well, like something hanging beneath a typographic hound.
Yes, this was a thing; yes, it appeared in serious texts; yes, the Oxford English Dictionary records the term by the mid-20th century.
For decades, readers were assaulted by this thing on every page. Entire novels sprinkled with the typographic equivalent of a crude graffiti doodle.
It (probably) made sense in the typographic texture of the day.
So then why’d it die out? Because tastes change; fashions tighten; and a general trend toward cleaner pages and simpler marks took hold. We consolidated. We retired certain flourishes with a grateful pat on the head. We swapped powdered wigs and Mummy unboxing events for haircuts and social media trends. Some things die of elegance. Others die because they look like canine genitalia.
And you think em dashes are bad? Imagine AI spamming that instead of dashes. Yikes.
Every tool we invent ends up shaping taste. The fountain pen made a certain kind of flourish fashionable. The typewriter disciplined margins and created a love affair with monospaced neatness. The smartphone has us writing like we’re all late for a train.
The real problem isn’t the em dash.
It’s the conveyor-belt writing culture that made every sentence look like it came from the same IKEA instruction manual.
The Slopocalypse is real because abundance is real. Words are easier to make than ever; therefore, mediocre words are cheaper than ever; therefore, we drown in them. The answer is not to exile a piece of punctuation to Siberia for the crime of being present at the scene. The answer is to decide when we are writing for the conveyor belt and when we are writing to be read.
The Washington Post put it cleanly: em dashes are not a reliable AI “tell,” and writers are right to defend their use. The real issue is preserving individual voice when the tools we use nudge us toward generic rhythms. That’s an editorial job, not a punctuation job.
Listen, the em dash is not new. If you want to ban em dashes, fine. But you’ll also need to toss out most of English literature. Good luck with that.
So yes: AI uses too many em dashes. The internet is drowning in slop. Everything sounds the same. Fine.
But at least we’re not wading through pages of Victorian prose littered with the typographic equivalent of an anatomical prank.
The em dash may be overused. But the dog’s bollocks was a war crime.