Some people say the em dash—this thing—is a dead giveaway that the writing is being done by AI. Most of the people pointing this out aren't writers. I've used em dashes for a long time in my writing. It's something I picked up from reading a variety of well-written books and articles. Casual internet writing doesn't have as many em dashes. But because GPT and Claude have scraped everything, it's gotten into the source code or whatever, and now a lot of AI outputs do have a lot of em dashes. I am aware that even though I may be writing something from my own brain and without the use of AI, someone may see an em dash—or any other arbitrary element—and incorrectly believe it to be AI generated and hit eject. The only realistic counter-strategy is to focus on making my writing as compelling as possible, regardless of the amount of known or unknown AI-esque signatures that may be lurking. Or perhaps just toss in a speeling mistake or two on purprose.