Perhaps – but it's a useful grammatical construct in everyday use, handy for structuring sentences.

And with the prevalence of AI, it rubs off on the smelly humans, who also find it useful and use it more as a result. (I used an en dash here instead of an em one – also valid, easier to type, and shorter).

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shikck200 9 hours ago | parent [-]

Nah. I NEVER say the dash pre-AI, at least in commoners writings. Maybe in some books etc. The dash you read today is 99.9% AI generated.

	▲	arw0n 6 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I've used it extensively in English due to learning the language through a lot of older books - but I've never bothered to actually pull out the emdash, I would hope people can see that I'm not trying to subtract one sentence from the other.
	▲	ofrzeta 7 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Where do you think the LLMs got the emdash from? When I worked as a magazine editor we took good care to discern ndash and emdash in printing. In Germany it is a Bindestrich (which links words, hence "bind") and Gedankenstrich (this is where you have a pause in thinking and continue the sentence afterwards).
	▲	surgical_fire 9 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		On the rare occasions I used Word to write things in the past, it would replace dashes with em-dash. I normally use dashes when writing, never bothered myself with writing an em-dash properly otherwise.