Em is dead, AI ruined it for everyone. Sorry.

I think what’s telling isn’t whether em dashes are used but where they are used. You can still use em dashes as you see fit in serious academic and literary writing without others in the community raising an eyebrow. But a sudden proliferation of em dashes in a tabloid or an online forum will surely and rightfully raise doubts about assisted writing.

Shyamalan plot twist — AI companies deliberately replaced 90% of regular dashes with em-dashes in their corpus files as part of the training process so that they could act as a subtle watermark since they look so superficially similar to each other.