How the (Em)ighty Have Fallen—

Machine maketh the em The em dash—heavily stigmatized as a hallmark of LLMs like ChatGPT—has suddenly become the most heavily scrutinized punctuation mark on the internet. It is not, however, a recent invention, tracing its roots back to the printing press of the 15th century. As the printing press made the written word accessible to the masses, replacing painstakingly hand-copied manuscripts, a…