The em dash – literally the width of the metal block once used to print the letter “M” – is at the centre of a punctuation debate taking shape around authorship and artificial intelligence.The Globe and Mail/The Globe and Mail
For centuries – or at least since the era of Virginia Woolf – the em dash has carved out a proud if unruly place in English prose. But now, for the crime of being favoured by writers for its many grammatical capabilities, the punctuation is being met with punishing stares.
To be clear, the em dash – literally the width of the metal block once used to print the letter “M” – is alive and well. In fact, it’s thriving to the degree that its sudden flood of appearances has become a telltale sign that an artificial intelligence platform such as ChatGPT may have written an e-mail, book or LinkedIn post. While writers have long turned to the em dash for dramatic flair or lively interruption, generative AI has taken that impulse and run with it − often in every other sentence.
As the use of such apps has skyrocketed in recent months, warnings of so-called “AI tells” have spread across online forums and social media posts. More recently, however, those warnings have been met by a loud and proud contingent of em dash users. Writers on LinkedIn are talking confidently about “reclaiming the em dash,” referring to it as “our voice.” Others are more plaintive: “Original em dash users are having quite a hard time right now. I am one of them.”
That sentiment underscores a tragic irony: Because writers use the em dash frequently, and because large language models such as ChatGPT are trained on vast amounts of human-written text where the punctuation appears with confidence, generative AI has learned to rely on it as a kind of catch-all – a shortcut that helps the model sound fluid and conversational without making harder stylistic or syntactic choices.
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The em dash is just one clue a robot may be holding the pen, but it’s perhaps the most visible example of how AI is reshaping discourse around writing – and maybe even writing itself. The typewriter made sentences shorter. The word processor was more welcoming to sprawl. Now, AI is nudging writers toward a different rhythm: efficient, repetitive and oddly uniform.
The em dash has done nothing wrong, but it has the unfortunate distinction of being a flashpoint for a new debate over what constitutes a human hand.
(Disclosure: The Globe and Mail style guide mandates the use of en dashes, which is why you won’t see em dashes used here.)
For authors, the development of AI isn’t in itself a threat. In many ways, the em dash is a representation of the technology’s limitations.
Anakana Schofield, an Irish-Canadian novelist whose 2015 work Martin John was shortlisted for the Giller Prize, said the preponderance of the punctuation is a clear example of how ChatGPT only knows what it has been told.
Because large language models such as ChatGPT can only make predictions based on the massive quantities of text they’re fed – sort of like autofill on steroids – they often produce grammatically pristine, structurally “correct” text. And that’s boring.
“AI cannot invent,” said Ms. Schofield, whose work was applauded for its “linguistic games” in a New York Times book review. “It doesn’t have an imaginative capacity.”
What Ms. Schofield values in her storytelling is the texture that comes from “imperfection” – erratic punctuation, experimental syntax, even failure. These are elements AI tends to smooth over.
If everybody uses the same platform to write, “everybody will be in the middle,” said Ms. Schofield, whose most recent work, Bina, centres on the inner thoughts of a righteously angry septuagenarian who dreams of being visited by a half-penguin David Bowie. “There won’t be any glaring deficits.”
Toronto-based author Craig Davidson, who also writes horror novels under the pseudonym Nick Cutter, said the future of fiction may hinge on the hunger for human creation.
“If there is a clear difference – if readers can sense the human messiness and craft – then maybe there’s still something to hold onto.”
Mr. Davidson, 50, whose pseudonymous novels conjure surreal, uncanny worlds that now feel eerily in step with the dreams and hallucinations of generative AI, said it will be a part of creative life “regardless of what we think.”
“This is a battle that’s going to be waged between people from that generation who really want to do things the goddamn old-fashioned way and those who say, ‘Screw it. This is quicker. Easier. Bloodless.’ ”
Lai-Tze Fan, a researcher at the University of Waterloo whose work focuses on the socio-cultural dimensions of technology design – particularly in artificial intelligence – said the push of AI into publishing could represent an opportunity for humans to “play around” with what writing means to them. If everything else is clean, in other words, it could be time to dig deeper into the dirt.
“If someone’s using ChatGPT – not even for essays, but just to compose e-mails or work documents – everyone starts to sound the same, and we start to question the authenticity of voice.”
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Dr. Fan, who has a background in the humanities, is a regular and unabashed user of em dashes.
“And all of a sudden I have all my students telling me I can’t use an em dash any more because it makes me look like an AI,” she said. “But I just have good grammar.”
She said it was troubling to hear students question the value of proofreading, fearing that a polished sentence – or liberal use of a certain punctuation mark – might be seen as evidence of AI.
But even that anxiety, she said, isn’t entirely new. Typewritten words aroused suspicions about a work’s origin because readers couldn’t see the author’s handwriting. Writers feared they would lose their sense of identity.
But those technologies also changed creative practices. The speed and standardization of the typewriter and the exact replication made possible with cameras directly spurred new art forms.
“With painting, we moved from realism to forms like cubism,” Dr. Fan said. “Because what’s the point of painting something perfectly if a camera can do it?”
