Em Dashes Fade While 'This Matters' Takes Their Place

A marketing firm called Graphite has measured AI prose against a human baseline. It took 10,000 articles published before ChatGPT existed, had current models rewrite them from short summaries, and counted which phrases appeared at least twice as often in machine text. It found about 13,000, according to TechCrunch. Gizmodo adds that Graphite sells marketing services, so take the results with some salt.

The headline is that the em dash, the old favorite, is nearly gone. In Graphite's samples, Claude Opus 5.5 used it 99 percent less often than Opus 5, GPT-6 Astra used it 88 percent less than the human articles did, and Gemini 3.1 Pro almost eliminated it. That reverses the August picture on our trend board, where Opus 5 had been running well above its predecessor. If you still delete dashes by reflex, you are chasing a tell the labs have already fixed.

What replaced it differs by model. Opus 5.5 likes to announce significance: this matters appears 116 times more often than in human writing, why X matters 92 times, and the word dependable 23 times. Astra prefers what Graphite calls corrective framing, defining a subject as not simply one thing or as an alternative to relying on another, more than 100 times as often as people do. Opus 5.5 has retired the classic contrast opener but still says something is more than an X, it's a Y.

Graphite's chief AI officer told TechCrunch that the total number of tells is not falling; individual ones just swap out. He also said Claude models are drifting toward the human word distribution while GPT models drift away. For a casual writer, last year's checklist is stale. Watch for sentences that announce their own importance or define things by what they are not, and read your draft aloud. Our draft checker and fix-your-ai guide cover both.