I hate this trend because I use em dashes a lot in my writing. Someone tell the AIs to throttle back on them a bit — people might think I'm using AI when I'm not.

I don't understand how people use or got used to using em dahshes? How do you even type them? theres no button for it so are you manually inserting, copy pasting it and why not just use a hyphen - instead of an en dash? Was this taught in schools or is it some form of technical writing?

Some office programs, and maybe even some blogging platforms, automatically turn two sequential hyphens into an em dash.

Shift-Option-Hyphen. I don't know where I picked up the habit of using them. I think back in the day before there were such characters I used double hyphens, but it's been a minute — using the keyboard shortcut is essentially reflexive now.

It's the poor man's semi-colon, because a lot of folks never learned how to use it correctly. Now a lot of word processors automatically turn a double hyphen to the em-dash--and here we are.