Brian Phillips:

It would be a tragedy if writers stopped using em dashes out of fear of sounding like AI, because em dashes are one of the best tools writers have for not sounding robotic in the first place. Their very potential to be irritating is a sign of what makes them so beautiful: Of all the forms of punctuation, the em dash is the one that most rewards tact, judgment, and taste. It has the closest relationship to the way we experience thinking—rushing forward, suddenly swerving, forking into different branches that eventually come together again. If chatbots copy our use of it, they do so for the same reason we need to protect it. It’s the most human punctuation there is.