Why the f*** does AI always use em dashes — the involuntary AI watermark

You want to spot AI-generated text without even reading it? Count the long dashes. The em dash (—). This little punctuation mark was living its best life in English typography for centuries. Then AI decided to make it its favorite toy. Every sentence. Every response. No exceptions. Open ChatGPT. Ask it anything. An email, a LinkedIn post, a cover letter, a pasta recipe. You'll get hit with em dashes every other line. It's systematic, it's mechanical, and it's annoying as hell. And here's what pisses me off: nobody actually writes like that. Have you ever seen a coworker drop an em dash in a Slack message? No. Because normal people use commas, periods, parentheses. Normal stuff. So why do AIs do this? Because they've been force-fed millions of "well-written" texts. Blog posts, Medium articles, technical documentation. And in that kind of content, the em dash is the universal sign of "I know how to write." The model got the message loud and clear: long dash = quality. So it throws them a