Why Does AI Use Em Dashes (—) A Lot?
AI just can’t stop using em dashes, like it’s in a secret relationship with them. But here's why...
So, apparently, AI has a crush. Not on you (sorry), not on me (thank God), but on this little horizontal line that likes to interrupt conversations—the em dash. You’ve seen it, right? That long dramatic dash that looks like a minus sign that went to the gym and bulked up. AI throws it around like confetti, and you’re probably wondering: why?
Recently, I started writing on Entrepreneur.com. While going through their guidelines, I noticed something funny: they require em dashes instead of colons, semicolons, and sometimes even commas.
Out of curiosity, I checked New York Times and Forbes, same thing.
Now here’s how it concerns AI…
Contrary to what people think, AIs LLMs aren’t trained for everything on everything on the internet (thank God).
They’re trained on selected, high-quality data. For example, for writing, they’re usually trained on data from respected publishers and media outlets. So if those publishers are obsessed with dashes, AI grows up obsessed with em dashes too. Monkey see, machine do.
That’s why even when you specifically tell AI “don’t use em dashes”, it still slips them in. Because deep in its training DNA, it believes that “good writing” = “dash every two seconds”.
So the next time you see an AI-generated sentence stuffed with em dashes, don’t roll your eyes too hard. Just know you’re looking at a machine trying its hardest to mimic the “good publishers”.
And honestly? That’s kind of ironic. AI learned to be annoyingly dramatic from humans.
By the way, I can’t even find an em dash on my keyboard, so I'm not sure where the publishers get it from.
