The dash for <abbr class="initialism">AI</abbr>

There is a new AI controversy in town: chatbots are ruining the em dash. Over the past year or so, a number of people have decided that texts created by generative AI applications contain more em dashes than might otherwise be expected. The complainants come from LinkedIn, 1 Reddit, 2 Instagram, 3 and beyond. There’s even a thread on a forum operated by OpenAI itself, 4 the company which owns…