Move over Oxford commas, em dashes a tell tale sign of AI use

23 April 2025

Another punctuation mark I’ve been a long time user of — the em dash — is apparently synonymous with text created by AI chat bots. Marvellous. You can see two instances of em dashes in the first sentence of this post. Last October I learned the presence of Oxford commas hinted at the use of AI to generate written work. If that is indeed the case, at least AI, by choosing to use the venerable punctuation mark, is showing its intelligence.

Even if that, as an Oxford comma fanboi, makes me look bad.

But back to em dashes — which you’ve probably noticed I apply incorrectly here, by placing a space between it and a word, instead of joining them up like this—the observation em dashes were indicative of AI’s presence, was made by LinkedIn influencers. LinkedIn influencers? Are they even a thing? According to these influencers however, the presence of em dashes can only mean text they feature in was generated by an AI technology.

Real people, it seems, use hyphens instead. How bizarre. Hyphens, of course, serve a completely different purpose. They are used to join words together. Em dashes are used to add a different, but possibly related, idea to a sentence. Why on Earth then use a hyphen in place of an em dash? But the LinkedIn influencers may be onto something. On most keyboards, the hyphen shares a key with the underscore symbol. In my experience though, there is no dedicated em dash button.

On my writing app, called Writer, I need to type in two colons, with three (oh, the irony) hyphens — or minus signs — in the middle, like this: :- – -: to render an em dash. Other word processors might allow this by, say, pressing the ALT key and entering a sequence of numbers, or trying the Insert, Special Character command, in the app’s menu bar. The point here though is hyphens are a little easier for a person to add, than are em dashes.

Therefore, the only possible conclusion that can be reached, by LinkedIn influencers I grant you, is that em dashes could only be the work of an AI app, never a lazy human. Certainly not one who won’t tap out a few extra key strokes, or copy and paste an em dash that may be elsewhere on the same document. But I doubt any of these thoughts crossed the minds of the LinkedIn influencers.

They were probably trying to chase down their next this-idea-might-go-viral post. If only creating viral content were as simple as selecting some random punctuation mark, and making up some absurd claim about it.