On the em-dash

The em-dash. I don’t use it everywhere, but I often employ it in my writing—a habit I developed after years of roleplaying in online games with native English speakers.

An "advanced, trusted GPT-4, ChatGPT and AI Detector tool" flagged the text above as 100% "AI GPT". If I swap the em-dash for a hyphen, it drops to 48%.

The em-dash is a stylistic choice that's been around since the 1830s–used to create a break in a sentence.

I don’t know why this particular style of writing is flagged as AI-generated—as if real humans can’t pause for dramatic effect. We're left second-guessing our own voice and swapping out em-dashes for clunky commas—just to prove we're real.

If that makes me sound like a bot—so be it.