> It really is unfortunate that such a fun piece of punctuation has been effectively gutted. This isn't even really limited to just the em-dash, but I don't know if there's another example of a corporation (or set of them) having such a massive impact on grammar and writing as OpenAI and their ilk have.

Well, to be fair Gen-z slangs also have a massive impact. My generation sometimes point blank said to me that they didn't have the attention span to read my sentence :/

Definitely picked up a few slangs along the way now. I had to somehow toggle a switch between how I write on HN/how I write with my friends the first few times and I write pretty informally in HN, but its that you got to be saying lowk bussin rizz 67 to make sense.

My friends who use insta literally had Abbreivations which were of 9 letter words in my own language that the insta community of my nation's gen-z sort of made.

Although I would agree that we haven't seen a whole unicode being thrown this way in ALL generations (I feel like universally everyone treats em-dashes as something written by AI or definitely get an AI alert)

But I think that 67 is something that atp maybe even most adults might have gotten exposed to which has probably changed the meaning of number.

The attention span thing is so real. I'll post a 2 sentence response to a comment and get a "I'm not reading allat"