AI is right about em-dashes

There’s a notion going around that em-dashes signify AI authorship. From a comment on Slack:

Yesterday a buddy of mine told me that the "-" between words in a sentence is a perfect indicator it was written by AI. Anybody else hear that? Now i can't unsee it!

—soon followed by the logical and unfortunate:

Yes, this is a really common indicator. […] I actually go through and remove them afterwords.

Gently: this is the wrong way to look at what is happening here. You should be using em-dashes in your writing. The AI has learned this practice from writers and editors who are good at what they do, and you should follow its example.

Otherwise, what? The AI gives you generic text, and you’re going to take a hammer to it to try and hide its origins? This is not a sound strategy for moving up the Literacy Gradient.

Bluntly: the AI is using em-dashes because it has been trained on my writing. For 25 years I’ve been writing on the world wide web, and manually typing em-dashes and curly quotes into the plain-text source of everything I write — blog posts, online comments, tweets and commit messages — because it’s optimal, and it’s not hard to do. I’m not going to stop just because the AI is copying me.

Good typography conserves reader attention

If you believe reader attention is a valuable resource, then tools that help you conserve that resource are likewise valuable. Typography is one of those tools.

Good typography can help your reader devote less attention to the mechanics of reading and more attention to your message. Conversely, bad typography can distract your reader and undermine your message.

I’m not suggesting that the quality of your typography is more important than the quality of your writing. It’s not. But typography can make good writing even better.

But dashes in particular — who needs ’em?

Pick up a printed book written by anyone known uncontroversially as a good writer (I don’t know who you have on your shelf). You will find em-dashes in there, even though the book was not written by an AI — that’s the first thing to notice. Flip through it, edit out the dashes in your head, replacing them with hyphens or commas. You should see that these edits generally make the sentences worse.

If you cannot see this, you need to read more!

There’s no substitute for good taste

Consider this sentence, written by an AI:

This diagnostic gives you a fast way to spot the warning signs — before things get worse.

The average user, operating on current folk wisdom about AI and punctuation, is going to edit out the em-dash, to keep people from guessing they used AI, making it flat:

This diagnostic gives you a fast way to spot the warning signs before things get worse.

A very illiterate hack might actually replace the em-dash with a hyphen, producing the unfortunate compound nonsense “signs-before”:

This diagnostic gives you a fast way to spot the warning signs - before things get worse.

Buddy, stop worrying about the AI and just look at this thing. Say it out loud. You see what the actual move is, right?

This diagnostic gives you a fast way to spot the warning signs.