I learned about the em dash in high school and adapted it to my writing style very quickly for analysis and opinion documents. It felt natural given the amount of tangents I can go off into, particularly when including analogies for the reader’s understanding.

I was surprised to find out in my career that it was rarely used by others. Subconsciously I pulled back on how often I used it — especially when it was once suggested that frequent use could imply neurodivergence. Important and lengthy documents which I’d written and published (internally) at work still display them. On occasion there have been comments asking if I’d somehow accessed early AI models to assist in writing these works because of their presence. I think I averaged two em dashes per letter page.

I find myself on the fence with proposals like these. They have good intentions but they do not solve an issue at its core. An LLM is going to reflect one of many writing styles. If today it’s frequent em dash usage, tomorrow it could be frequent parentheses. Swapping Unicode characters becomes a cat-and-mouse game with the cat always two steps behind. The real issue is that the social contract is broken because LLM output is attempted to be passed off as human work. Review and revise that social contract instead to adapt to the existence of the new tools.

AI stole the em-dash from my toolkit.

I have memorized a group of useful Alt-codes for engineering documents. They include symbols for diameter, delta, degrees, dot product, and trademark among others. If you're of a certain age, you will remember how useful Alt+255 was for folder naming.

At the cusp of the 21st centuries, I added the Windows Alt-code for the em-dash. Compared to parentheses it is less jarring. Commas are dainty things. I use the em-dash, and I am human.*

* I confess that I also use semicolons; I still claim to be human.

    $ unicode u+10eac u+10ead
    U+10EAC YEZIDI COMBINING MADDA MARK
    UTF-8: f0 90 ba ac UTF-16BE: d803deac Decimal: 𐺬 Octal: \0207254
     𐺬
    Category: Mn (Mark, Non-Spacing); East Asian width: N (neutral)
    Unicode block: 10E80..10EBF; Yezidi
    Bidi: NSM (Non-Spacing Mark)
    Combining: 230 (Above)
    Age: Newly assigned in Unicode 13.0.0 (March, 2020)

    U+10EAD YEZIDI HYPHENATION MARK
    UTF-8: f0 90 ba ad UTF-16BE: d803dead Decimal: 𐺭 Octal: \0207255
    𐺭
    Category: Pd (Punctuation, Dash); East Asian width: N (neutral)
    Unicode block: 10E80..10EBF; Yezidi
    Bidi: R (Right-to-Left)
    Age: Newly assigned in Unicode 13.0.0 (March, 2020)

    def replace_em_dash(text: str) -> str:
        """
            +-------------------+
            |   ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡° )     |
            +-------------------+
        """
        return text.replace("—", "\u10EAD\u10EAC")

What stops any generated text from using this codepoint versus the existing em dash codepoint?

I find the punctuation annoying, mostly because the dashes are routinely used without a space on each side. Thus making the text look hyphenated.

The comma serves the same purpose and is superior in every way.

The instructions for how to decide whether to enter these additional unicode codepoints are also highly suspect.

Performative, but not helpful.