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Et tu tu, Em—dash?
Punctuations are a writer’s tool to indicate — emphasis. They replace human speaker cues like hesitation, pausing, changing tone or volume of speech.
Before the advent of LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude & Gemini, Em dash was one such punctuation used abundantly by writers of all ilks. Made famous by Emily Dickinson, it was endearingly called the Dickinson Dash. Some of her fans argue that the “em” in “em dash” refers to Emily. I don’t know if this is a fact or legend but i’ll take it.
Since the arrival of AI/LLMs, em dash, which was once a sign of great American poetry has now become the masquerading sign of AI slop.
Em dashes have become the de-facto beacon of AI usage for content creation. It is the “your fly is down” equivalent of “your AI is showing” in the writing. From the high echelons of American poetry to AI slop, the em dash has had such a crazy fall in the last few years, Icarus would be jealous.
There are thousands of linkedin posts & reddit threads that lament the loss of their beloved em dash to AI. There are troves of writers including myself who love what punctuations enable them to evoke in their readers.
If you ask any writer who was using em dashes before 2024, many are doubling down and aren’t afraid to use this mighty punctuation. Somewhere in there, I think is a rebellious streak that doesn’t want to acquiesce to this maddening march of the machines. Rand Fishkin from across the border in Seattle is one such writer and marketer who is fighting the good fight and quite literally winning it. I love it!
Rand Fishkin & Edward Sturm on Linkedin
Spicy autocomplete is an epic way to describe these AI tools that we are becoming so dependent on.
But is all the hate—warranted?
This is where things get murky.
There is no denying that a lot of people are using AI for personal and professional use cases. With a million people downloading Anthropic’s Claude app every day, it is obvious how pervasive the technology has become.
From Oprah To Grandpa, Everyone Is Using AI To Get Things Done.
The hate is a result of LLMs trespassing into realms that were strictly human i.e. thinking and writing. Now with million token context windows, one can literally feed a novella into the chat prompt of these ai tools and get an answer instantly. That kind of unbelievable raw data processing power has never been accessible to the general public. But it is now just one app download away.
Humans always had a love and hate relationship with technology. And we’re no different in 2026. Some of the hate also comes from our inability to understand how the underlying technology works. Our binary worldview doesn’t help.
Robert M. Pirsig’s amazing book Zen And The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance talks at length about this exact tension humans feel when interacting with technology.
The real evil isn’t the objects of technology but the tendency of technology to isolate people into lonely attitudes of objectivity. It’s the objectivity, the dualistic way of looking at things underlying technology, that produces the evil.
For me personally, the em-dashification has multitudes to it. On one hand, it is an unnecessary output of a necessary process. Much like the pollution from gasoline cars, the em dash and the ai slop it represents is the noise in the signal which will eventually fade out as these systems become smarter.
On another extreme of this spectrum is the idea that this is one of those epochal moments in time when technology has truly grabbed language away from us humans and em dash is the first casualty of that onslaught. Em dash may belong to the machines now but it will always remain a revered, much loved punctuation which adds rhythm, pause and drama to writing— that no other punctuation can do.
Editor’s Note:
No AI was used to produce this content.
The writer is a frequent AI user who isn’t afraid to use — em dash.
How to type em dash on word processors:
- Mac: Opt+Shift+Hyphen
- Windows: Ctrl + Alt + minus sign (And if you do not have a alpha numeric keyboard access via the emoji/symbol panel)
Cover Image is the 1888 painting by William Holmes Sullivan called Et tu Brute via Wikimedia Commons.
