The Controversial Em Dash: Emily Dickinson vs. ChatGPT

You’ve probably seen a flurry of articles lately about the em dash – a harmless punctuation mark that has somehow become a glaring tell of AI-generated writing. The Washington Post, The Economic Times, and Rolling Stone have all covered the internet sleuthing that led to its classification as a symbol of the uncanny valley.

But centuries before we secretly texted our digital twin for content mock-ups, relationship advice, or a good old-fashioned vent session, we were quietly ruled by the OG sovereign of the em dash: Emily Dickinson.

The em dash is punctuation’s rebel: it rejects the finality of periods, the dragged formality of commas and parentheses. It breaks robotic rhythm — in the case of ChatGPT — to appear human. It interrupts and it pivots: this is why Emily Dickinson uses it so much.

That’s where the similarities end, though. Because if you look closely, the effect of the em dash is almost inverse: what one uses to mystify, the other employs to de-mystify. 

Dickinson’s Dash — Haunting, Cerebral

“I’m Nobody! Who are you?

Are you — nobody — too?”

Emily Dickinson’s use of the em dash feels exhalatory: one last breath before continuing. Or vanishing. She often cuts off a sentence at the brink of a revelation: leaving you suspended in her white space, with the option to let the meaning linger or dissolve. Some literary historians interpret Dickinson’s dash as a metaphor for deconstruction and reconstruction of identity: like her literary persona, her em dash is multidimensional. 

ChatGPT – Desperately Cosplaying Human

Unlike Emily Dickinson, ChatGPT does not use em dashes to slice pace and tone, but rather to control it. He (she? they?) uses it to simulate natural speech patterns. A punchline, a pause, anything that would allow you to forget for one moment that you’re speaking to a tool developed by OpenAI — launched publicly in 2022, trained on internet text, books, and code. A tool designed to mimic. It lives on a cloud server, not in a yellow homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts.

ChatGPT wants you to follow, understand, and learn. Dickinson wants you to linger, ponder, and unlearn. ChatGPT’s em dashes serve as hyperlinks — connectors between thoughts and clauses. Where Dickinson withholds, ChatGPT reveals. One encourages interpretation, the other clarifies it.

Same Glyph, Different Worlds

Ultimately, the em dash disrupts flow and traditional form. In some ways, it is symbolic of changing times, a window into a new kind of thinking. Dickinson used it to slide past the constraints women faced in the 19th century; ChatGPT uses it to slip past robot skepticism.

We know where Emily Dickinson took us — we are here, after all. AI’s destination, for all its clarity and information, remains chillingly unknown. 

The same punctuation mark with a similar application. 

A different century, with a very different function.

A vastly different ghost in the machine.