When Good Writing Looks Like AI

I recently saw a funny claim online. People were saying that using em-dashes in writing is now an “AI tell.” In other words, if your sentences have em-dashes, some people might assume the text was written by AI.

That made me laugh.

Because many of us have used em-dashes our whole lives. Long before AI tools existed. Long before anyone worried about sounding “too AI.”

Em-dashes are simply part of good writing. They help add rhythm to a sentence. They create small pauses. They let a writer add an extra thought without starting a new sentence.

Writers have used them for decades. Journalists use them. Authors use them. Teachers taught them in school. They were never strange or robotic. They were just good punctuation.

But the internet has a funny way of turning normal things into signals.

Right now, people are trying to guess whether a piece of writing is human or AI. Since it is hard to tell, they start looking for patterns. Maybe the text is too structured. Maybe the tone feels too polished. Maybe the sentences are too clean.

And now apparently the em-dash has joined the suspect list.

It is strange when you think about it. A punctuation mark that existed for hundreds of years is suddenly being treated like a clue in a detective story.

Imagine someone writing a thoughtful paragraph and then being told, “Hmm, those dashes look suspicious.”

The funny part is that many good writers naturally use them. They help connect ideas smoothly. Sometimes a comma feels too weak. Sometimes a full stop feels too final. The em-dash sits somewhere in the middle and gives the sentence a nice flow.

Without it, writing can feel stiff.

So when people say the em-dash is an AI tell, it creates a strange situation. Writers who learned proper punctuation suddenly feel like they need to defend their own writing style.

It is almost like being accused of cheating on a test because your handwriting is too neat.

This shows something interesting about the current moment on the internet. We are all trying to figure out how to live with AI. We are learning how to spot it. We are debating what human writing should look like.

But sometimes the discussion goes a bit too far.

Not every well written paragraph is AI. Not every structured sentence is artificial. And definitely not every em-dash is a robot signature.

In fact, if anything, it proves something funny.

Many of us learned to write in a way that looks polished, balanced, and clear. If that style now resembles AI writing, maybe the machines simply learned from us.

So the next time someone says em-dashes are an AI tell, the best response might be simple.

We did not start writing like AI.

AI started writing like us.

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This post was previously published on ILLUMINATION.

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