Grammar Girl here. I'm In Jan Fogarty, and I bet many of you are as tired as I am of hearing about M-Dashes, being a sign of AI writing.

But today I have someone really interesting who can help us answer a question that is more interesting, which is why? Why does AI use

so many m-dashes? Sean Getakie is a software engineer for GitHub. He's from Melbourne, and he is a

prolific blogger who writes about all these issues. Sean, welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast.

Hi, Minion. Thanks for having me.

You bet. So I saw your blog post and I was instantly fascinated because it's this thing that people in my world, all the writers, are talking about and debating whether we should leave M-Dashes out of our

writing because everyone thinks it's a sign of AI. And I have always loved

the m-dash. I used it a lot. So I didn't even really notice that it was being used so much.

But obviously now it's a thing. I always felt like so much normal writing, so much good writing,

has m-dashes. Like, isn't that just why AI is doing it because it's in human writing?

Well, the short answer, and maybe I'm preempting the podcast entirely with this, is yes,

that's basically why it is.

But there are interesting questions around why it emerged, because the initial versions

of AI, chat GPT3, didn't use m-dashes. And the latest versions of AI, chat GPT3, didn't use MDashers. And the latest

versions of the models use M dashes less. That was one of the things that absolutely fascinated me.

So 3.5 barely used M dashes at all, right? Yeah, that's right. It certainly was not enough

for people to talk about it as a sign of AI. It might have used the odd one here or there, but it wasn't the kind of extreme overuse we saw out of later models, like 4-0 and 4.

Yeah. So that's a clue, right? Yeah, well, it's a mystery. I think one of the most interesting things about this is that I have, as we'll get to, I think, some theories about why this is happening,

but nobody knows, like nobody actually knows, not even the people who sort of build the models

know, because it's so non-deterministic, this process of like constructing an AI model, because

it's trained or grown rather than kind of designed from scratch. It's really like emergent

behavior, this use of m-dashes. Yeah. For the audience, you know, a lot of writers, why don't you

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