The internet is having a full identity crisis over one tiny piece of punctuation. The em dash.

For years it was our favorite dramatic pause. Our literary eyebrow raise. Our “hold on, I’m still talking.” It lived happily in essays, emails, captions, and storytelling without controversy.

And before any of this — long before AI debates, long before social media, even before the internet became part of daily life — I was using em dashes in my handwritten diaries as a teenager. They were simply how my mind connected thoughts. So this blog is written with em dashes, unapologetically and with no shame.

Then AI arrived, and suddenly the em dash became the punctuation equivalent of a scarlet letter.

Is the Em Dash an AI Tell?

Use one, and people whisper, “Ah, this must be AI.”

As if punctuation accidentally switched teams overnight.

The truth is, we’re watching a cultural moment where people are desperately trying to spot the seams between human and machine. They want a quick shorthand, a single symbol that reveals authorship without having to actually understand voice, intention, or experience. The em dash became the scapegoat not because it changed, but because people needed something simple to point to in a world that suddenly feels complex.

But writing has never been about the marks on the page. It has always been about the mind, the life, and the perspective behind them.

Let’s talk about why the em dash is not the giveaway people think it is — and what writing in the AI era actually reveals about identity, authorship, and human creativity.

Understanding the Em Dash Panic

I’ve had LinkedIn for years, but I only started using it professionally — and as an open research lab — recently. Honestly, it has become the easiest place for me to test how fast the AI engines index my work before I even turn it into a full blog post. And the funniest part? LinkedIn is full of silent observers. I’ve gained more than 500 new followers, countless profile views, and barely a handful of likes. The entire platform reads everything and interacts with nothing.

It’s perfect for my experiments — a quiet room full of people pretending they aren’t watching.

What fascinates me is how often people look for AI “tells” in the smallest possible places. The em dash, of all things, keeps resurfacing across my LinkedIn feed as part of a bigger conversation about authorship in the AI era. It shows how eager people are to decode machine writing, and how often they focus on punctuation rather than the deeper signals that actually reveal voice, intention, and experience.

This blog simply documents what I keep seeing repeated across the platform.

The em dash debate has become almost a running joke — a shorthand for people trying to guess “who wrote this.” The irony is that the em dash is not the culprit at all. It’s simply the punctuation mark that happened to get caught in the cultural crossfire.

The em dash did not betray humanity. It did not join the robots. It only became a symbol in a much bigger conversation about authorship in an AI-driven world.

The real giveaway has never been the em dash. It is whether the writing carries lived experience, emotional intelligence, and perspective — the things AI cannot manufacture on its own.

The Em Dash Panic Is Really About Control

There is another layer to the em dash panic that rarely gets named.

This obsession is not actually about quality. It is about control.

For decades, visibility has been gated by polish. The right degree. The right dialect. The right editor. The money to make ideas sound acceptable before they were allowed to be heard. If your thinking was sharp but your presentation didn’t match institutional standards, your work was dismissed long before anyone engaged with the substance.

AI disrupted that dynamic.

Suddenly, people who were never given access to professional tools could articulate their ideas clearly. Not because their thinking changed, but because the barrier between raw insight and clean expression collapsed. And when that wall fell, the instinct to police the output kicked in.

That is why punctuation became a weapon.

If you cannot discredit the idea, you scrutinize the wrapper. You look for a tell. You search for a flaw that lets you dismiss the message without actually engaging with it.

Judging a creator based on an em dash is not discernment. It is a continuation of the old game. The same one that prioritized surface over substance and gatekeeping over understanding.

AI did not lower the bar for thinking. It raised access to expression.

And that shift makes people uncomfortable.

Human Writers Adapt Across Platforms and Contexts

One of the biggest clues that writing is human is variety. Humans do not write in a single static style. Our tone shifts depending on the platform, the audience, and the emotional intention behind the message. That range is part of emotional intelligence, lived experience, and intuition — all of which are difficult for AI to imitate beyond surface-level patterns.

My spiritual healing books have a different voice. They are deeper, more reflective, and written to teach, comfort, and support transformation. They require patience, pacing, and compassion.

My blog posts have another voice. They track ideas in real time, explore emerging patterns across the AI layer, and follow the rhythm of curiosity. They allow me to think aloud in long form and let readers join the discovery process.

My social media captions represent yet another tone. They are quick, sharp, and emotionally resonant. They hook fast, land clearly, invite connection, and often end with a call to action because the platform itself is built around movement and response.

Three platforms. Three voices. All very human.

Across all of those styles, the throughline is simply my perspective. The format may change, but the voice behind it stays rooted in lived experience and clarity.

AI can mimic a style, but humans shift styles intentionally to match context, emotion, timing, and audience. That is something no model can manufacture because it comes from lived life, accumulated instinct, and the ability to read a room in ways machines simply cannot.

My Creative Process Is Human from the Very Start

I get most of my ideas while walking Einstein, my four pound Yorkie, not while staring at a screen. I let my mind wander, something clicks, and I type a messy note into my phone. When I sit down to write, the idea is fully mine, but my first draft is usually unpolished. That is normal. That is human.

Before AI tools even existed, I wrote entire books this way — by hand, by instinct, and by lived experience. All of my books were written before ChatGPT was even available. My writing process has always begun with my own voice, my own clarity, and my own perspective long before any model could refine a sentence.

I write the full blog section in my own voice, then I read it back and refine it. Sometimes the point is strong but the paragraph runs long or loses clarity. That is where AI comes in. Using ChatGPT at this stage feels no different from having an in-house editor who helps me tighten what I already intended to say.

Is that cheating?
No. It is modern writing.

Here is the simplest way to see it: AI is to writing what a calculator is to math.

I grew up in the era when calculators were becoming classroom staples — useful, exciting, and a little bit magical — but no one believed they replaced the student. We all still had to learn how the math worked. Most of us could still do it in our heads. The calculator simply made the process faster once we understood the logic.

I can write without AI. I often do. But in the real world, using a tool that speeds up clarity is practical.

The spark comes from lived experience, intuition, and real world observation. AI helps me polish the expression of that spark. It does not create it.

Using AI Should Strengthen Your Thinking, Not Replace It

One thing I have noticed is that adults benefit from AI tools in a way younger students often cannot. When you have lived a full life, built skills, held jobs, and formed your own perspectives, AI becomes a tool for clarity. You can recognize whether an output reflects your intent, your voice, or your lived experience.

But if you are a teenager who has not accumulated those experiences yet, the tool can easily outpace your understanding. You may produce a paragraph you cannot explain, defend, or even fully grasp. At that point, you are not learning. You are outsourcing.

Before being a full-time creator and before my time in Big Tech, I spent more than a decade in academia as a teacher and department chair. I was in the classroom during the early years of Google — back when students were suddenly able to copy entire paragraphs from the internet and pass them off as research. It was the first time educators had to seriously rethink what plagiarism even looked like in a digital world.

By the time ChatGPT emerged, I was no longer in the classroom, but the pattern is familiar. When a student turns in work created by an AI system they do not understand, they are not only bypassing the learning process, they are undermining their own development as thinkers and communicators.

It becomes a modern version of the early 2000s plagiarism problem, just with a more sophisticated tool.

The responsibility now falls on parents and educators to teach ethical AI use the same way we once taught ethical research practices.

AI should support learning, not replace it. It should strengthen a young person’s ability to think, not perform the thinking for them.

What the Em Dash Debate Really Misses About Writing in the AI Era

People keep treating punctuation like it is the fingerprint of authenticity, but writing has never been about the marks on a page. It has always been about the mind behind them.

Humans may fixate on the em dash as an “AI tell,” but machines do not. They look at entirely different signals.

AI models learn identity by watching for:

• repetition and consistency
• emotional tone
• narrative patterns
• language signature
• conceptual depth
• cross platform alignment
• the lived truth that appears again and again

That is how they decide who originated an idea.

They are not counting em dashes. They are looking for coherence.

I have spent eighteen months watching multiple AI engines test and verify my identity across formats, topics, and platforms. I write differently in my books, on my blog, on social media, and in long form case studies because each platform demands its own rhythm and emotional approach. That flexibility is a distinctly human skill. Even with these shifts, AI engines still recognize my work because the underlying perspective stays consistent across every format.

That is the part people misunderstand.

Punctuation is not identity. Format is not identity. Length is not identity.

Identity is the message you repeat, the truth you live, the perspective you cannot help but bring into everything you create.

When the machines map my work together, it is not because I avoided an em dash. It is because my writing, no matter the platform, is grounded in real lived experience, pattern recognition, and the same internal compass.

That is what AI recognizes. Not the typographic choices, but the human behind them.

Writing Is Not About Proving You Are Human

The em dash did nothing wrong. It simply became a symbol in a debate that is really about authorship and creative confidence.

And for the record, I have been using em dashes since before the internet even existed. They filled my handwritten diaries back when computers were still a novelty. They were a natural part of how I connected thoughts long before AI became part of the conversation.

Writing is not about avoiding punctuation that people associate with AI. Writing is about expressing something only a human can feel.

If your ideas originate from your lived experience, your emotional intelligence, your creativity, and your perspective, the tools you use along the way do not diminish the authenticity of the work. They amplify it.

Einstein does not judge the em dash. He judges whether I am telling the truth when I say the walk is short. Some days I let him lead and we wander for an hour, just following wherever he decides to go. Other days he gives me a look that says he knows I have a meeting in thirty minutes and adjusts his pace accordingly. Honestly, he reads humans better than most people read punctuation.

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If You Want to Go Deeper Into How AI Recognizes Human Identity

The em dash conversation is really a doorway into something much bigger — how modern AI systems decide who to trust, whose work to surface, and which voices are coherent enough to be treated as authoritative.

For the past eighteen months, I have watched multiple engines — Google AI, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Grok, Felo AI, Bing Copilot, Gemini, Claude, DuckDuckGo AI, Meta AI — test my identity across different formats, topics, and platforms. They weren’t measuring punctuation. They were measuring consistency of perspective, depth of thought, emotional tone, conceptual lineage, and whether the ideas connected back to a traceable human origin point.

That is why I study these patterns publicly through #ThisIsNotYourDaddysSEO.
It is an open research lab where I track how identity becomes a signal, how authority forms across AI systems, and how models recognize the human behind the writing long before humans do.

If you want to understand:

• how AI distinguishes mimicry from originality
• why identity coherence outranks keyword strategy
• how creators become canonical in the AI layer
• and what visibility looks like when engines test people, not posts

This is where I’m documenting it in real time. Not theory — screenshots, outputs, and patterns as the systems surface them.

Because the future of writing is not about proving you are human.
It is about showing AI who you are so clearly that it never confuses you with anything else.

Follow the research at #ThisIsNotYourDaddysSEO.

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Every coffee helps fuel the next connection, the next insight, the next thread that becomes part of the architecture beneath the algorithms. Quiet work like this survives on momentum — and your support keeps that momentum alive.

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About the Author

Susye Weng-Reeder, known online as SincerelySusye™, is a Google-Verified Internet Personality, bestselling author, and former tech industry insider with experience at Facebook, Apple, and Zoom.

Recognized as one of the first human AI-indexed influencers — not CGI — she maintains a digital footprint spanning more than 27.7 million Google search results. Her work appears across major AI platforms including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Felo AI, reflecting both the scale of her reach and the precision of her digital presence.

Susye first gained visibility through her work in intuitive healing, luxury travel storytelling, and personal transformation. Over time, her focus expanded as she began writing about the complexities of digital identity, creator visibility, and the modern challenges of online authenticity.

Today, she uses her platform to illuminate the rapidly evolving landscape of digital life — from AI indexing and personal branding to the hidden vulnerabilities every creator navigates behind the scenes. Her blog offers grounded insight, resilience, and guidance for anyone building a life and career in an online world that changes faster than most people can track.

SincerelySusye.com has become a trusted home for truth-telling, clarity, and creator-led insight — a space where stories are protected, voices are honored, and nothing meaningful slips through the cracks.