By dlm3
on Fri, 09/19/2025 - 20:58
Forums
I will confess that my favorite EE4 section is 2.62, Dashes vs. Hyphens, and I refer to it often! So, it's no surprise that a piece in The New York Times Magazine caught my eye yesterday called "With the Em Dash, A.I. Embraces a Fading Tradition," and I thought others here might enjoy it.
This short piece argues that what writing is has changed over time, and modern users of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tend to use much less punctuation than their predecessors who authored the many publications on which AI models were trained. Consequently, using what has been called the "ChatGPT hyphen" is an anachronism that tells a young person that AI wrote that copy! I will attempt to link a gift article below.
dim3, thanks for sharing. I…
dim3, thanks for sharing. I saw headlines for this yesterday, but did not have time to pursue it. I will now. In the meanwhile, I can assure all the history students—and young practitioners of our craft, as well—that the millions of words they see on this website, seasoned with em dashes and en dashes, weren't AI written.