ChatGPT loves the em dash ( — ) the way a Labrador loves a tennis ball — enthusiastically, indiscriminately, and with absolutely no sense of when to let it go. That’s why seeing an em dash used in ...

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, ...

Let’s talk about the em dash. Not the little innocent hyphen, not its slightly more confident cousin, the en dash. No, I’m talking about the 'EM dash,' that long, dramatic line that AI looooooves to ...

It seems a day does not go by without seeing someone confidently assert on social media that an em dash is not an indicator of AI-written text. Those social media posts are in response to an ongoing ...

“Any chucklehead who disagrees with an online post can, if that post happens to include an em dash, dismiss it with the claim that it was written by a chatbot. It’s gotten so bad that people on random ...

I’ve been teaching English for more than twenty years, long enough to watch punctuation trends come and go like fashion. The Oxford comma had its civil war. The semicolon had its fall from grace. But ...

Em dashes have become what many believe to be a telltale sign of AI-generated text over the past few years. The punctuation mark appears frequently in outputs from ChatGPT and other AI chatbots, ...

OpenAI has not achieved its goal of developing a superintelligence or artificial general intelligence, nor has it cracked its planned construction of an autonomous “AI researcher.” But it has figured ...

In recent months, a curious fixation has emerged in corners of academia: the em dash. More specifically, the apparent moral panic around how it is spaced. A dash with no spaces on either side? That ...