On Reddit in the chatgpt sub, there is at least one post a day about people claiming that the em dash  —  was never used before ai, that people never even knew about it before ai, and that anyone who uses it in their writing is showing that they used ai to do the writing for them. Completely ridiculous claims, of course. One only has to look at any novel from the 1800s to the present to see em dashes everywhere. But I think it's telling. The vast majority of people never read or write except in school and never do so after their school years. Due to that, pretty much all signs of good writing — not only strange typographic characters, but also good sentences, making an argument in your writing, etc — are becoming unknown. Then when people are confronted with it — well, I can't write like that and I don't know what that strange symbol is, so it must be ai.

Anything we don't know how to do looks like magic, after all. To a professional magician attending a magic show, it's kind of boring, but to people who don't know how to do the tricks and don't even know the techniques to mislead the audience, it is amazing and looks like, well, magic.

As ai gets better and better, so are claims that pretty much all writing over instant message length is ai.