This got me thinking… why does AI use em-dashes nearly exclusively? I think “in the wild” examples overwhelmingly weight toward en-dashes instead.
This is something that has been on my mind for quite some time. I understand why people don't want to read AI slop, but I find myself using negative parallelism in my writing frequently and I've wondered how to navigate it now that it has a stigma. I've assumed that there's something particularly meaty about drawing that kind of distinction, and that is why LLMs reach for it so often. But the given explanation about how a sentence unfolds when written by an LLM was really insightful.