why does AI use so many em dashes?
AI uses so many em dashes because they're common in the confident, polished writing these models were trained to imitate. Nobody outside the AI labs has published a hard number, and OpenAI says it isn't a reliable "tell" either way.
Em dashes aren’t a secret AI tell by themselves — they’re a punctuation mark that shows up more in the edited, professionally typeset text these models trained on than in the average person’s fast typing. The real giveaway is usually a pattern, not one character: unusually even sentence lengths and a smoothed-out rhythm.