I love the em dash, and I fully support this:
The idea—the terrible, mistaken idea—is that the use of em dashes in a piece of writing is a sign that the text was generated by AI. Some people have been saying this on, guess where, the internet. The implication is that human writers should avoid em dashes for fear of being mistaken for chatbots. No. Wrong. I am here to raze this implication to the very ground and salt the earth where it stood.
But of course this is not really about punctuation:
If generative AI does have a predilection for em dashes, though, the reason is simply that many human writers use em dashes. Your chatbot also uses commas, just as human writers do. A chatbot does not have a consciousness. It does not “know” how to write, in any meaningful sense. It doesn’t have a style, because style requires thought, preference, and taste.
And, ultimately:
it’s not accurate to say that the use of em dashes in a text is a sign that the text is AI-generated. It’s more accurate to say that the prevalence of em dashes in AI-generated text is a sign of how reliant the AI companies are on the human writers they want to replace.