Everybody thinks they can spot AI, and when it comes to text, the favorite signal is em dash usage. I was one of those people. I put this report together because I recently gave a recommendation on removing em dashes to sound more like a human, I wanted to make sure I wasn’t full of it, but it turns out I was . I analyzed em dash usage on the daily top 10 articles in Hacker News since 2018 (80M words). Here are the details. What I expected: A jump after November 2022 when ChatGPT launched. Maybe 20-30% higher em dash usage as AI-assisted content flooded the web, then a drop after people started declaring that em dashes were dead in 2024. The reality was the exact opposite. What I found: 2019: 1.40 (peak) 2022: 0.96 (ChatGPT launches in November) 2023: 0.93 (-3%) 2024: 0.82 (lowest in the dataset) 2025: 1.21 (+48%) 2026: 1.27 (partial year) Dashboard link (methodology included) Interpretation: 2024’s drop might reflect writers consciously avoiding em dashes after reading all those “how…
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