AI Anxiety Is Forcing Me to Retire the Em Dash

Told to strip em dashes because they are seen as an AI tell, the author defends them as central to his voice and thinking. He explains that AI uses them because it learned from human writing, leaving him caught between authenticity and employability. The essay ends as a rueful farewell to the em dash and a protest against AI‑driven conformity in prose.

Key Points

Editors and readers now treat frequent em dashes as a sign a text might be AI‑generated.
The author relies on em dashes to mirror his thought process and writing rhythm.
LLMs learned heavy em‑dash usage from human text, making the mark a default pattern for AI.
He faces a dilemma: keep his natural style and risk losing work, or switch to clunkier punctuation that feels wrong.
He laments that AI fears are eroding individual voice and jokes that semicolons would have been a better casualty.

Sentiment

The overall sentiment of the Hacker News discussion is largely sympathetic and commiserating with the author's predicament. There is a strong sense of shared frustration and defiance against the perceived loss of stylistic freedom due to anxieties surrounding AI. While some voices express skepticism or offer critiques, the dominant tone is one of solidarity in defending the em dash and personal writing style.

In Agreement

Many users confirm they have actively started editing out their own em dashes to avoid being mistaken for an LLM.
Some subreddits are explicitly forcing users to remove em dashes, validating the article's claim about external pressure.
There is a strong sentiment of defiance among users, with many stating they refuse to relinquish em dashes and some even vowing to use them more frequently as a form of protest.
Commenters agree that em dashes are appropriate and expected in editorial pieces, making their forced removal particularly egregious.
The overall discussion reflects a shared frustration with the erosion of personal stylistic freedoms in writing due to AI anxiety.

Opposed

Some commenters question the core premise, highlighting that software like MS Word and iOS have been autocorrecting to em dashes for years, predating current AI concerns.
It is suggested that the issue extends beyond em dashes, as even using a rich vocabulary can lead to accusations of AI generation, implying a broader, perhaps overreactive, suspicion.
One user dismisses the article as "filler" that AI could easily replace, implicitly downplaying the significance of the author's stylistic concerns.
A viewpoint is presented that AI-generated content would likely also have em dashes edited out by human reviewers, making the "AI tell" argument illogical.
One commenter critiques the author's use of an em dash in the article's title, implying the problem might be improper usage rather than the punctuation mark itself.
It is argued that the pressure to remove em dashes comes from "AI haters" rather than from AI technology itself.