“In the past few months, a curious fixation has appeared in the corners of the academic world: the EM dashboard. More specifically, visible moral panic around the way it is spaced. A dash without spaces on each side? It must be a writing generated by AI.
– Joseph MELLORS, ED inside
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I would like to attack the recent slander circulating on social networks, in editorial channels and on the fringes of newly decent substitutes. More specifically, the baseless and foundation accusation according to which my use is a sign revealing artificial intelligence.
Listen here, my good slut.
The writers use me well before the advent of the AI. I am the punctuation equivalent of a cardigan – experienced by Mfa Graduates, used by publishers when it is cold and worn all year round by the writers. I’m not new here. I’m not new. I am the cigarette that you continue to say that you leave.
Do you think I introduced myself with Chatgpt? Mary Shelley used me… for free. Dickinson? Obsessed. David Foster Wallace has built a temple of footnote notes in my name. I am not an elegant and futuristic glyph. I am the dorsal thorn stained with coffee beaten of writer panic – the breathless break where a thought should have ended but simply could not.
Let’s be honest: the real problem is not me – it’s you. You just don’t read enough. If you have done, you know that I have been here for centuries. I am in Austen. I’m in Baldwin. I appeared in the prose winner by Pulitzer, the viral praise and the last paragraphs of breakdown e-mails which required “a little more punch”. I am exercised by novelists, bloggers, essayists and a friend who hits exclusively in tiny but always requires emotional scope.
If anything, AI uses me as often as any type of sentence obsessive that has already looked at a line as it owed them rent. In fact, go to your nearest coffee and look to your left, then to your right. One hundred percent of these people slide me through sentences such as adding cheese to a risotto that already drowns with parmesan – without tasting, without thinking, without remorse.
And yet, when a piece of reflection packed with me goes online, I am sort of the problem – the blatant lack of verification of the facts.
Just because I am not on the keyboard – and you have to add two additional steps to see correctly – I suddenly be the product of a soulless technology? Please. AI has no delays. No ego. No human brain deprived of sleep that stored forty of me in a project, just for a publisher to cut twenty.
I am the punctuation mark of human fragility.
I am the writer’s block, resolved in the middle of the sentence.
I am the change of OG atmosphere.
So the next time you read something and you think: “I wrote this-there are a lot of EM dashes”, ask yourself: is it? Or is it just a poet who tries to make you dizziness in four lines or less?
Exactly.
Sign,
—The dash em
PS you probably think of in dash. This whore has always been suspect.
