Sigh. I just saw two posts here pushing the "real authors don't use em dashes, that's an AI thing" myth and I am tired. 😣
Hi. Hello. "Real author" here. I have never used AI in any part of my writing or process, ever. I use em dashes all the time. So do other real authors. In fact, there'd be a fight to the death if you tried to take our em dashes away from us. Sometimes, a semicolon just won't do, and you *need* that em dash. Other times, you *must* use an em dash (when a character gets interrupted mid-sentence or mid-word, for example).
The *reason* you see em dashes in AI slop is because those LLMs were literally built on the stolen works of real authors. Who use em dashes. All the time.