There are countless signals you might look for to determine whether a piece of writing was generated by A.I., but earlier this year the world seemed to fixate on one in particular: the em dash. ChatGPT was using it constantly — like so, and even if you begged it not to.

As this observation traveled the internet, a weird consensus congealed: that humans do not use dashes. Posters on tech forums called them a “GPT-ism,” a robotic artifact that “does not match modern day communication.” Someone on an OpenAI forum complained that the dashes made it harder to use ChatGPT for customer service without customers catching on. All sorts of people seemed mystifyingly confident that no flesh-and-bone human had any use for this punctuation, and that any deviant who did would henceforth be mistaken for a computer.

Those deviants were appalled, obviously. I am one; I am, even worse, a former proofreader who could speak at length and with passion about the uses of the narrower en dash. I understand very well that this dash-happy lifestyle is maybe atypical, but I had not expected to see its whole existence questioned. The dash is a time-honored and exceedingly normal tool for constructing sentences! Dickens, Dickinson, Nietzsche, Stephen King novels, this magazine — all strewn with dashes. Part of what makes them popular, in fact, is that they can feel more casually human, more like natural speech, than colons, semicolons and parentheses. Humans do not think or speak in sentences; we think and speak in thoughts, which interrupt and introduce and complicate one another in a neat little dance that creates larger, more complex ideas. (Or, sometimes, doesn’t: The copious dashing in J.D. Salinger dialogue is a great illustration of all the thoughts we leave unfinished.) This is the whole thing punctuation is for.

The best A.I. signal the dash offers isn’t about punctuation; it’s about orthography. ChatGPT sets its dashes in the traditional style of a printed book — a stroke the width of the letter M, with no surrounding spaces. The average computer user does not type like this. The average user may not know the keystrokes that produce this character. (Or its name; some discussions called it a “ChatGPT hyphen.”) The average user just pops in a hyphen (-) or two (--), which some software corrects to that underloved en dash (–). More important, the average user puts spaces around their dashes, as most online publications do — it helps text wrap more neatly between lines.

But the arguments kept revolving around the dash itself. People talked about it as if it were some uncanny eldritch rune that no self-respecting human would even think to deploy. “Nobody uses the em dash in their emails or text messages,” one commenter insisted. “This punctuation is irrelevant to everyday use-cases.”

Oceans of communication that used to be handled by speech are now left to lone individuals typing into the internet.