Dash It All! Is AI Em Dash Addiction Real?

Happy Friday. Let's talk about punctuation. If you've spent any time reading AI-generated text, you've probably noticed it. That long dash that keeps showing up everywhere. The em dash. This thing: — It's become so strongly associated with AI writing that real humans who've always loved em dashes are reportedly stopping using them, just to avoid looking like a chatbot. An entire punctuation mark, tainted by association. People are even adding deliberate typos to their writing so it looks less machine-generated. I wanted to know if this is actually universal across models, or just a stereotype. So I did what any reasonable person would do on a Friday afternoon. I wrote a script, pointed it at every text model available on Amazon Bedrock, and counted the dashes. Know Your Dashes Hyphen (-) joins compound words and prefixes. Self-taught, re-enter, well-known. En dash (–) shows ranges and connections between pairs. Pages 10–25, the London–Paris train, 2020–2026. Named because it's the widt