@maxleibman

Believing you can spot AI-generated text based on the prevalence of em dashes is the new phrenology—the real kind—the kind that feels clever—the kind that feels empirical—the kind that lets you gesture at a sentence and nod knowingly—as if punctuation were destiny and typography a moral failing. It’s comforting—deeply comforting—to believe there’s a shortcut—a hack—a shibboleth—that separates the human from the machine—because uncertainty is tiring—and ambiguity is humiliating—and being wrong in public feels worse than being simplistic in private. But em dashes aren’t a fingerprint—they’re not residue—they’re not exhaust—they’re not a glitch in the system—they’re not a tell—they’re not anything but a pause—a turn—a hinge—a way of thinking out loud on the page—used by humans—messy humans—contradictory humans—rambling humans—from Dickinson—who loved them obsessively—to Didion—who wielded them like scalpels—to anyone who’s ever felt that a comma was too timid—and a period too authoritarian—and parentheses too apologetic. Treating them as proof of machine authorship is pattern-recognition run feral—heuristics unmoored from evidence—confidence without calibration—a Rorschach test for tech anxiety—where the inkblot is punctuation and the diagnosis is always AI. Like phrenology—again—it flatters the observer—it rewards the guesser—it sells certainty in exchange for rigor—and it collapses the rich, slippery, imitative reality of style—its borrowing—its mimicry—its contagion—into a single overworked dash—stretched far past its breaking point.