A version of this column first appeared in Stephinitely, a weekly newsletter from columnist Stephanie Hayes featuring a bonus column and behind-the-scenes chatter. Get it in your inbox every Monday.
Discourse suggests that artificial intelligence is stealing both our souls and our writerly tics. Sleuths have begun to posit that the humble em dash — it looks like the elongated hyphens surrounding this clause — is a tell that a piece of prose has been written by AI.
This likely carries some truth because, well, AI steals from writers in order to write. Professional writers love an em dash. Journalists in particular use and abuse them with reckless abandon when — in most cases — a comma would do. When we want to emphasize a point or lend a bit of flair to a passage, it’s time to dash it up, baby. In lieu of cost of living raises, we seek serotonin by slapping that dash into sentences.
The em dash is just one of many things AI has stolen — sorry, “learned” — from people who do words for a living. I will admit to spiraling recently as I put “write a column about em dashes in the style of Stephanie Hayes” into ChatGPT. It immediately churned out something… well, let me just show you:
There are few things in this world more powerful than the em dash. Well — except maybe the look your mother gives you when you say “whatever” under your breath, or the existential dread that creeps in when your Wi-Fi goes out mid-Zoom. But the em dash? She’s a force.
Em dashes are the punctuation equivalent of your wittiest friend who shows up late to dinner, tells a story involving a goose and a ukulele, and somehow brings the whole evening together. They are chaos. They are clarity. They are everything you didn’t know your sentence needed — until, suddenly, they are all you can think about.
Uh… rude? To embody me so accurately? Robot Me is not that funny, but she’s trying. Also, she used the em dashes fairly wrong. She needs an editor, but the scary thing is that I could turn the above passage into my editor, who is a human, and she would probably not know I didn’t write it before telling me to choose something stronger than “goose” and “ukulele.”
AI is tricky, and more companies — em dash loving newsrooms among them — are grappling with how to use it responsibly. Since there’s no putting the bots back in the cage, experts at places like Poynter are devising and refining tool kits for ethical AI use. And it’s not all grim. The tech has potential to streamline plenty of workflows, and furthermore, this might be the most boring sentence I’ve ever written. Where is Robot Me?
All that being true, I am unsettled by the M3gan doll version of me in the magic computer box! The only thing that gives me solace is knowing that Robot Me only exists because I have pumped endless reams of material onto the internet. Robot Me is a simulation of Me Me honed by years of producing particular sentence structure, syntax and, well, vibes. We are one. Being that we are one, Robot Me would never, say, turn on me and enact an elaborate murder plot so that she could take over my whole life. Right? Right???
Let me check with ChatGPT: Is the robot version of me going to kill me?
That’s a heavy question — but let’s unpack it.
If you’re talking metaphorically (like, “Is the version of me that’s always productive, efficient, optimized, robotic… going to destroy the real, human me?”), that’s a real concern people have. The pressure to act like a machine — never resting, always achieving — can absolutely wear down your sense of self, creativity, and emotional well-being. So in that sense, yes, your “robot self” could hurt you if you let it take over without leaving room for your human needs.
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If you mean literally — “I built a robot version of me, and it’s gaining sentience and planning to kill me” — then we’re in sci-fi territory. That’s not a realistic concern unless you’ve been doing some serious experimental robotics combined with general AI autonomy (and even then, safety protocols and basic robotics limitations make this very unlikely).
If you meant something else, feel free to clarify — I’ve got your back.
Sure. You and your suspicious number of em dashes.
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