How to connect authentically with readers when artificial intelligence threatens trust
Artificial intelligence is not just standardizing how communications professionals write — it’s standardizing how we edit.
You may notice something familiar in the prior sentence: the “It’s not just this — it’s that” sentence structure, juxtaposing two ideas across an em dash. A few years ago, that sentence structure would have been considered a beautiful marriage of form and content. Today, it’s regarded as a formulaic “AI indicator” — a pattern so common in machine-generated writing that it raises suspicion.
As AI indicators like the em dash appear more frequently across the internet, some professional communicators are eliminating them entirely — whether or not AI was involved — to prevent the perception that writing wasn’t granted the time and care it deserves.
So, while the em dash is thriving in some areas of the internet, it is also being edited completely out of others.
As a writer who believes in using every syntactic tool available, I hope the heightened attention on AI indicators ignites a renewed commitment to deploying the full arsenal of the English language to write with fearless creativity and intention.
That pursuit should be inclusive of all punctuations and sentence structures.
Overuse, Underuse, and Intentional Use
Among writing professionals, 61% use AI tools in some way — especially to suggest possible titles or headings (72%), find the appropriate words for a concept (68%), or generate a draft for further editing (63%).
Most AI-assisted writing happens in the drafting and editing stages, circumventing the time spent staring thoughtfully at a blank page to write a first draft, or reading a long piece for typos word-by-word.
The resulting paradox is that AI-assisted writers who use the tool ethically for support then find themselves editing out some of the elements that make their writing most effective.
The over-avoidance of AI indicators is a symptom of a deeper issue: writers fear that in a fast-paced, increasingly digital communications field, readers may not give their work the attention it deserves. I admit that this fear manifests in my own recurring nightmare of a carefully crafted social media post landing in someone’s feed, then the user sees an em dash, assumes the worst, and scrolls past with an eye roll.
However, when writing deploys its full toolkit intentionally — including AI indicators when they are genuinely the best choice — the message earns audiences’ trust with a call-to-action which is difficult to ignore.
When the hands-on human stage of writing is focused on the effect, inserting that em dash to clarify the relationship between two ideas can maximize impact and build the audience’s trust with a message that employs all available tools to achieve clarity.
Building Trust Through Fearless Creativity
The fear that audiences will doubt the originality of our work in the AI age is not the em dash’s fault — nor the semicolon’s, contraction’s, or tricolon’s. The very reason these choices are common in AI-generated writing is their effectiveness when used correctly.
They appear lazy only when used lazily. It makes sense that we can expect this style from machine-generated writing that pulls from already-published texts in a matter of seconds.
Eliminating AI indicators is like confiscating the phone of a distracted person while leaving the television on; it doesn’t solve the underlying problem, and it doesn’t build trust.
Use that em dash between parallel clauses; assume that personalized tone with your contraction; add that third item to your list when it strengthens the structure.
Let your fearless creativity speak for itself, and build trust with your audiences along the way.
