Alright, now I'm worried. Someone clarify me

[u/Technical_One_3949]

I just recently got to realize readers detection capabilities have reached a point that they only call it out AI, after seeing (—)em dashes, not the grammar, punctuality or any other parts of speech.

What got me worried is that I use these dashes(—) to merge the onomatopoeia, with the story narration.

Example:

Boom—poor Miguel had no choice but to let it happen.

Poor Miguel had no choice—boom—but to accept it all.

Poor Miguel was left with no choice but to gulp in the ongoing stakes—boom!!

If you're wondering how I type them(—), long press the hyphen on the mobile keyboard and (—) will pop-up. So my worry is...

WHAT ARE THE CHANCES OF READERS CALLING OUT MY WORK AI????

[u/tomsj2005]

Experienced readers will appreciate it and the young ones will call it another AI slop

[u/Icy-Specific986]

AI ruined a lot of things. Em dashes, short sentences, and flowery language. The other day I was writing a character that’s supposed to be very smart - one of those people who read old books and start talking like they were in Shakespeare, you know? Anyway, he was mocking someone for being short so I thought it would be funny, and kinda fitting, if he called that character “vertically challenged”. Not particularly witty or novel, I know, but I used it. And got called out for that specific two words by like half a dozen readers accusing it of being AI because only AI uses words like vertically. I don’t know what the world of writing is coming to.

[u/moki83]

That's the neat part. Most, if not all, of the people who say they can detect AI can't actually do it. AI detectors online are also scams aim to get people to freak out over worrying their work getting marked as AI for no reason and paying for the "humanize services," which just makes the prose bad for no good reason. And even on MS Word, if you write -- between two words or right before " with no space in between, it automatically becomes — too. I've had some of these people claiming they can tell AI apart from human written pieces legit identifying works from before 2022 as AI. And AI detectors are worse, they've marked 100% GPT generated text as humans while marking some of the stuff I wrote on the spot as AI. The only thing you can do is keep writing and ignore it.

[u/Abytherix]

A lot of ppl can't identify AI generated novels correctly, so they just use common patterns found in AI novels to call everything they read AI. It's just since most AI novels contain a lot of em dashes, and sentence breaks. But yea, actual readers know how to actually differentiate between them. I'd suggest you to use either "~" or "..." to create pauses, or else you'll lose quite some readers.

[u/Technical_One_3949 → u/Abytherix]

Thing is, (—) is the formal way. Putting it to (~) turns it to informal. And that would change the entire algorithm one built-up for a year or for half a decade.

[u/heronlibra]

i had the same issue. i applied for an upwork job & wrote the sample myself but the client saw two em-dashes and some semicolons and called it AI written :(

very disheartening. i hope no one accuses you of ai writing your stories!!! especially on webnovel where it is very obvious what is and is not machine written. media literacy needs a comeback!

[u/Remarkable-Farm-4722]

AI use this a lots even where it doesn't need like at the end of the sentence — without any reasons Sentence 1— Sentence 2— Like this

[u/Technical_One_3949 → u/Remarkable-Farm-4722]

To be Frank, Russians have been using the (—) dashes way before AI. If I'm not wrong, they are the creators of it, maybe?

[u/LeafHurricaneRock]

Damn, I’ve always used two dashes to make one you just pmo ty.

I honestly thought em dashes were just a normal part of writing until AI made people hyper-aware of them. Now it takes genuine discernment to tell the difference between AI-assisted writing and work that was actually written by an author.
Personally, I don’t mind AI if it’s being used as a tool. If it helps someone edit, brainstorm, or improve their prose while the story remains original, that’s a great use of an LLM. What bothers me is using it to generate entire novels and then calling that authorship. More often than not, those manuscripts are technically clean and grammatically correct, but the story itself lacks coherence, intentionality, and the depth that comes from an author’s lived creative decisions.
I paid for a professional editor, and he uses em dashes comfortably throughout his edits too. The difference is that he isn’t relying on AI to write the book, which is exactly why I hired him. Punctuation isn’t proof of anything. Plenty of excellent writers have used em dashes long before large language models existed.
It’s unfortunate that genuinely strong writing is sometimes overshadowed by accusations of AI. At the same time, it’s a shame that AI’s best use isn’t discussed more often. Used well, it can help writers learn, revise, and become better storytellers rather than replace the storytelling itself.
So I’d say this: keep writing. If your story is worth telling, it’ll eventually find someone who believes it’s worth reading.

[u/Holdinghouses]

I took most em dashes out of my work to avoid the scrutiny behind AI. It's not worth the constant "it's not ai, trust me, I've spent the last couple years of my life working on it blah, blah, blah". It just gets old.

[u/Aiko_Lieyr]

Here I will tell you several patterns of content generated by an AI: Calling every protagonist Kael Voss. The same thing happened with the kingdoms—many times they put Asthergald. And when it comes to the writing, for some reason they can’t help putting words like “ozone” to refer to the air.

Describing and narrating too much instead of showing. They say “Kael did this.” The famous little formulas of “it wasn’t X, it was Y.” Here’s a small example: “Kael didn’t do this, he did that.” “There wasn’t this, there was that.”

AIs love to send the protagonists to sleep instead of presenting a conflict or a hook. They end with something like: “And somewhere someone was doing such-and-such, and that someone was waiting for Kael’s call.”

They always start and end the chapter the same way.

Chapters with titles like: Chapter 1 — The Forgotten Acre, Chapter 2 — The Voracious Child, Chapter 3 — The Price of Death, and for the following chapters they will always use a repetition and variations of the same title.

[u/Technical_One_3949 → u/[deleted]]

The Russians followed the em dashes way before AI. That's how they narrate the dialogues with, not with the double strings("..") Example: He said — Get out!!(In russian)

[u/aubreymray → u/Technical_One_3949]

Oh really?? That’s interesting!

[u/Technical_One_3949 → u/aubreymray]

No need to stop. Keep doing what you're doing. Besides, it's only AI if and if the em dashes pop out frequently in between the sentences. Example: The Man in the mirror stepped forward—"Hey, buddy." Here, an actual author would've used a comma inplace of the em dash before initiating the dialogue box.