Its how they're used though, not just that they are used. For example, hyphenating words is common enough, but what wasn't all that common prior to LLM's is peo

Its how they're used though, not just that they are used. For example, hyphenating words is common enough, but what wasn't all that common prior to LLM's is people using them to combine sentences -- like this. In general while reading blogs, Reddit, HN, youtube comments, X posts and so forth, I rarely never saw run-on sentences like that combined with em-dashes. Sure, they existed, but it was pretty uncommon up until about two years ago and now I see them all the time. So anecdotally, there is absolutely a shift in usage right around the time that LLM's took off. I wouldn't judge a professional article or book by its use of em-dashes, but I absolutely judge user generated text on the web. Its not the only thing I judge on, though. Its just one of a number of red flags. Frequent uses of lists (of usually three items) and of bullet points too -- and run on sentences, not just the em-dashes. Yes, I did that on purpose.