The panic over one punctuation mark says less about AI than it does about writers optimizing for the wrong audience.

The em dash has become a Rorschach test. Use one, and somewhere a reader is deciding you let a chatbot write your sentence. The advice that follows is predictable: strip the dashes, prove your humanity, perform the absence of the machine.

I find the advice backwards, because of who you’re letting into the room when you make the decision.

The mark became the evidence

For 25 years, I’ve used the em dash sparingly. Partly because William Safire’s 2000 essay “Dash It All” has lived rent-free in my head ever since I read it. Mostly because I’m an unrepentant lover of commas and semicolons. The comma gives me cadence. The semicolon gives me the music of conjoined thought that a period interrupts. The em dash, used well, is a punch. Used poorly, it’s a writer who couldn’t decide which mark to reach for and grabbed the loudest one.

So I understand the impulse behind the current panic. Many AI-generated drafts now lean heavily on em dashes, and readers have started treating the mark as forensic evidence. Custom instructions for ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini are full of “no em dashes” rules for exactly this reason. The dash has become, in some corners of the web, evidence. And the proposed remedy is for writers to retrain themselves around a piece of punctuation in order to avoid suspicion from readers they will never meet.

That’s where the logic breaks.

The reader was not the only gatekeeper

Last fall, my daughter applied to a competitive data science program — about forty seats. The application required a specific essay, submitted through a proprietary AI tool that returned a numerical score and a list of suggested improvements before the essay reached the admissions committee. I helped her proof a few drafts.

Something strange kept happening. Each time she stripped em dashes out of the essay, the score dropped. Each time she put them back, in the same places, the score climbed. She submitted the final version — 700 words, five or six em dashes, more than she had originally planned to use — because the tool standing between her and the readers she actually needed to reach told her, in numbers, that the dashes were doing something the commas weren’t.

I think about that essay often. The tool wasn’t the audience. A human admissions reader was. But the tool had been trained, by someone, to recognize signals the institution had decided were worth measuring. And in that case, it rewarded the exact punctuation mark the broader internet had decided was evidence of machine writing.

The real issue is audience discipline

The lesson isn’t that em dashes are good. The lesson is that the audience you’re optimizing for is doing more work than most writers admit — and the proxies that route you to that audience may be reading for signals you’ve been told to remove.

Most of what I write is read by an executive-level audience — developers, investors, public officials, people who decide things for a living. They care whether I’ve named the dynamic correctly, whether the argument holds, and whether the next move is clearer for having read the piece. Punctuation matters only insofar as it serves cadence and intent.

The writers I see twisting themselves into knots over em dash use have made a category error. They’ve started writing for a reader they don’t serve, in order to disprove an accusation that reader hasn’t actually made. The audience that hires them, reads them, pays them — that audience was never running the scan in the first place.

The prose is the diagnosis

There is a deeper version of this problem worth naming. If a reader can’t tell whether your sentence was written by a person or a machine, the punctuation isn’t the problem. The thinking is. The dash is a symptom; the prose is the diagnosis. No amount of removed dashes will rescue a paragraph that has nothing in it. And a paragraph with something in it doesn’t need the alibi.

Write for the people you mean to reach. Use the punctuation the sentence requires. Let the strength of the idea answer the question of who wrote it.

Long live the em dash.