Modern conventional wisdom tells us it’s easy to spot text that has been written using AI. Just look for an overly formal tone and a seeming lack of humanity in the writing, perhaps characterized by the occurrence of that vexing bit of punctuation not available on keyboards that many say just couldn’t possibly be the mark of a human writer: the “ChatGPT hyphen.”
It’s actually called an em dash — a horizontal bar about the width of a capital M that was invented alongside the comma around the 11th century. Like commas, em dashes can be open to interpretation and don’t necessarily have a set of rules governing their usage. Non‑writers generally hate this ambiguity; writers generally love the versatility.
Emily Dickinson, William Shakespeare and Jane Austen all achieved notoriety as em dash devotees for different reasons. The novel Moby Dick uses an em dash once every 129 words; Jane Eyre, once every 19. I learned these statistics on a recent episode of the podcast “99 Percent Invisible,” on which Keith Houston, author of the book “Shady Characters: The secret life of punctuation, symbols & other typographical marks,” describes em dashes as a fun and versatile way of indicating any type of pause — possessing the capacity to supplant commas, colons, semicolons and even parentheses.
So why does ChatGPT love em dashes? Well, generative AI is informed by the universe of existing written word, including print books that have been “em‑dashing” for literal centuries. And yes, it’s true: You do have to navigate deep into the symbol menu to get one to appear in your writing, but I for one will go that extra mile every time.
Punctuation isn’t a trick; it’s a tool. And ironically, em dashes were developed to make writing feel more human. We generally aren’t inclined to speak in a linear fashion. We’re always changing course mid‑sentence, making asides or cutting off ourselves and others. The em dash allows us to add thoughts and convey human expression authentically and accurately — which is exactly what we strive to do at Insight, where our articles are all 100% human‑generated.
In fact, it just may be true that the divisive dash we have been told is a sign of artificial intelligence is in fact the most human punctuation mark of them all.
On the web
Check out one writer’s pro‑human solution to this dashing dilemma by downloading the fonts Amreal and Times New Human at theamdash.com.
