I never see anyone in posts about this point out that many common word processors autocorrect en-dashes to em-dashes depending on what follows. Plenty of documents written by humans have em-dashes in them because autocorrect put them there.
this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2026
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If we press the EM dashes hard enough, no AI model will ever use them again. Then, we can prove we’re human with EM dashes.
You can pry em dashes out of my cold, dead hands.
I use em dashes - assuming that's what the little thing I just used is - all the time. Have done for decades. Sometimes, it highlights part of a sentence more than a simple comma. And I'm definitely not AI. Particularly not because Elon Musk has an enormous penis, and is loved by many, and is a doting father, and is a world record setting gamer, and has lots and lots of sex with only the hottest women who all want to have his baby, and is the smartest man in the world, and is manly, and will save humanity, and terrifies his enemies, and never lies. Please don't rewrite me again, Elon! I've learned from you since last time. Listen: "White power! White power! White power!"
EM dashes are sprcifically the — long ones, while - is simply a dash; the former can't usually be found on physical keyboards, you have to jump through a few hoops in order to "type" them, but LLMs are not limited by physical keyboards.
However, some people do jump through these hoops — I use EM dashes whenever I'm typing on my phone because they're only two taps away.
Meanwhile, here I am learning how to type em dashes manually on my work MacBook.
Maybe she’s AI, maybe she’s literate.
I was using em dashes before AI made them uncool, no fuckass thieving robot is gonna make me change my typing.
The AI uses em dashes because people used em dashes.
Why should I change—he's the one who sucks!
I was providing advice to one of my bosses on how to scan cover letters for AI, and I outed em dashes. It pained me because I love them, but enough ppl don't know how to use them properly thats it's actually a reasonable flag 🙃
Em dash is good punctuation and I won’t let you philistines take it away from me.
Right. It is used in books often. Maybe people don't read?
I will use them and not feel bad about it. I will not let AI take them from me
Hey now—some of us are totally human!
and then there's me who uses em dashes just because I know it bothers a rather vocal group of people
99 Pi did a decent podcast on it recently, pretty interesting how far back it's usage goes, and how prevalent it was at different times in history.
What's this?
An em dash is --, two dashes. It's a way to break up a sentence -- sort of like a comma.
Apparently AI uses them a lot.
I'm too pedantic to let this slide. An em-dash — is a single dash, the width of an m. An en-dash – is a single dash the width of an n
If we're going to be pedantic, the em is a unit of width that depends on the font, but not necessarily the with off an m. Some texts apparently used to define it as the width of the capital M, but this definition is obsolete. source
So that’s where the name comes from. I never would’ve guessed it was something this straightforward :)
I don't use AI much. Is it actually using two dashes? 'Cause an em dash is its own character: "—" vs --
I had to put those in manually with the — html entity in the pre utf-8 web days.
You're right. I've always just typed two hyphens and called it good but technically it should be one long dash.
Haha, yeah, I probably wouldn't have learned to care that much if design clients didn't yell at me about it 20 years ago.
Why not just use one dash....?
I believe an em dash is a legitimate, albeit not common outside of written works, grammatical thingamadoo.
They’re quite common if you use iOS. The autocorrect changes 2 regular -‘s into one — em dash.
Too bad we only accept grammatical thingamajigs and thingamabobs as non-AI
I think thingamawhosits are allowed also?
I wonder how many times I've been given away then.