The Em Dash & ChatGPT

Oh, the em dash.

I have long used this exquisite tool of punctuation to great effect, as have so many authors from Dickens to Fitzgerald to Salinger to even the contemporary John Green. At times, some readers and editors have actually pointed out their confusion at what exactly this mark is, comments which befuddled and amused me. 

As an editor of student writing, I was often bemused by students' inability to distinguish the hyphen from the dash, and programs like GoogleDocs were actually a bit slow to adapt coding to reflect the actual look, meaning location and length, of the dash.

Anyway, until recently I was aloof to the apparent issue that ChatGPT has with the em dash. And, while I have accepted the presence and even utility of the AI software, I am quite miffed at the tarnish and shadow the program has cast upon my beloved piece of punctuation. I first heard of the controversy a couple days ago while listening to our composition teacher mention it to the class, as the class discussed an essay from Green's The Anthropocene Reviewed.   

And then coincidentally, the New York Times weighed in yesterday with a feature article:  "With the Em Dash, AI Embraces a Fading Tradition"

There are countless signals you might look for to determine whether a piece of writing was generated by A.I., but earlier this year the world seemed to fixate on one in particular: the em dash. ChatGPT was using it constantly — like so, and even if you begged it not to.

As this observation traveled the internet, a weird consensus congealed: that humans do not use dashes. Posters on tech forums called them a “GPT-ism,” a robotic artifact that “does not match modern day communication.” Someone on an OpenAI forum complained that the dashes made it harder to use ChatGPT for customer service without customers catching on. All sorts of people seemed mystifyingly confident that no flesh-and-bone human had any use for this punctuation, and that any deviant who did would henceforth be mistaken for a computer.

Those deviants were appalled, obviously. I am one;