There is No “ChatGPT Hyphen”
By Carrie Cousins
Thank you to Valley Business FRONT for featuring our Vice President, Carrie Cousins, in their September 2025 issue.
An em dash is not an automatic signal that your copy was written by artificial intelligence.
The em dash is a fantastic punctuation character that is designed to signal a change in thought, an aside, or a pause in the flow of reading. It’s the text equivalent of a long pause in a monologue.
And when used in the context of human writing, you can almost feel the meaning in this simple long dash. You feel the change in the flow or storyline.
The drama currently surrounding the em dash as a signal that AI wrote something is almost comical. There are so many other ways to tell.
I am constantly looking for “AI infected” writing in copy that comes from clients because we know that AI hallucination is a real problem. Without the inside knowledge of a business or industry, this false information can hide and creep into unchecked AI writing with ease and make you look silly, or like a liar, to those who know better.
Telltale signs of AI writing often include distinct cadences or patterns that are monotone and lack rhythm when you read out loud. There’s little passion in the writing even though it is easy to digest, and it can be predictable. (The formula often looks like this: Header, followed by a two sentence paragraph, followed by a bullet list, followed by a summary sentence.)
There are other more subtle tells as well:
- Citing sources without links (or even sources that don’t exist).
- Use and reuse of phrasing, “on one hand,” “plays a vital role,” “it is important to note,” and similar phrases that are grammatically correct, but unlikely to ever escape your lips in conversation.
- Inconsistent tone or style, especially when it comes to your brand.
- Uniform writing style without sentence structure and complexity, and lacking subtitles such as sarcasm, humor, and puns.
- Lack of directly quoted material or human sources.
- Factual errors for highly specific information.
Clients often ask: If it makes writing faster, why is it a problem?
Using AI tools can come with great benefits; use them to generate ideas, look up things quickly, or even help when you are stumped. But don’t rely on the outputs.
Your brand voice carries high value with your audience, with common passions, needs, and fears. Flattening that to generic statements and writing will break that bond.
Here’s an example:
A client recently relayed that customers were coming to their location to buy a product with an unrealistic expectation of price – $100, far below actual retail of the item at $749.
They could not figure out why people had this expectation. They finally asked a customer “Where did you see that price?”
It was in a search-generated AI overview.
The copy looked real. The product model number was correct. Usage and application of the product was correct, but the price was dead wrong.
The business had been hit by an AI hallucination.
And it was causing a real-life headache.
There’s no AI engine that can truly replace human writing. That skill has value, is interesting to read, carries passion and brand value, and is at the root of an essential element of the human experience – storytelling.
Carrie Cousins is the Vice President at LeadPoint Digital in Roanoke. For 15+ years, she has helped businesses tell their stories and get better results online with practical digital marketing strategies. She is also an active leader in AAF, serving on the local and district boards, and is an adjunct professor at Virginia Tech.
