Duly Noted

Yes, the em dash — or as some now call it, the ChatGPT hyphen — became a supposed giveaway of machine-written text. Never mind that writers have used it for centuries. Suddenly, this punctuation mark was being treated like an AI watermark. As if the dash had just been invented by OpenAI.

_{Quote Citation: the federal, “Em dash: A stylish punctuation mark you’re wrong to accuse of being AI-generated”, 2025-06-01, https://thefederal.com/category/features/em-dash-stylish-punctuation-mark-ai-generated-english-grammar-language-189918}