Em dashes mean AI wrote for you, am dashes mean you did the writing

22 April 2026

If you subscribe to the notion that the presence of em dashes (—) in a body of text means — in the AI age — the piece must have been composed by an AI agent, you could consider using am dashes instead. Yes, that’s right: an am dash, as opposed to an em dash.

The am dash looks a little like a tilde (~) but with a slightly longer, flat mid horizontal section, between the curly ends. Its creators are calling the am dash a punctuation mark — don’t things likes need to be ratified first? — and, in addition, claim it is unusable by AI.

The am dash may be unusable by AI agents at the moment, but as we’ve seen, AI learns quickly, and copies even faster. If you want to use the am dash in your writing, you’ll need to download one of two typefaces, which the new punctuation mark is inherent to.

By the way, I’m not being flippant when I suggest the am dash needs official recognition as a punctuation mark. I say so, because it seems to me readers unfamiliar with the am dash might think it’s an error, a typo. Maybe even an AI agent attempting to render an em dash, but botching it.

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