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Don’t let AI flatten your voice – what the em dash debate really means for PR

The Wall Street Journal recently sparked an unexpected debate: has AI ruined the em dash? It sounds trivial, almost niche, but it’s actually a signal of something much bigger happening in content, communications and PR.

Writers have started stripping out em dashes because they’re now seen as a telltale sign of AI-generated content. Think about that for a second. A piece of punctuation, used for decades by journalists, authors and copywriters, is suddenly being treated with suspicion, not because it’s wrong, but because it’s become too common in AI-written text.

And that’s the real issue. Not the em dash. Not even AI itself. It’s sameness.

AI tools are trained on huge volumes of human writing, which means they naturally replicate patterns, sentence structure, tone, rhythm. The em dash just happens to be one of the more obvious casualties of that pattern recognition. But the bigger consequence is that we’re starting to see content that feels eerily similar, no matter who it’s written for.

For PR, that should set alarm bells ringing.

Because the job has never been about producing content for the sake of it. It’s about cutting through. It’s about making people stop, read, feel something, and act. And that’s getting harder when the baseline for “good” content has been flattened by AI into something technically correct but creatively forgettable.

We’re entering a phase where audiences, journalists included, are becoming more attuned to what feels real and what doesn’t. The em dash debate is proof of that. People are actively searching for signals of authenticity, even if they can’t quite articulate what those signals are. Ironically, they’re sometimes getting it wrong, but the instinct is there.

They want human.

And human doesn’t mean perfect.

In fact, perfection is often the problem. AI tends to smooth everything out. It removes friction, balances every argument, tidies every sentence. The result is clean, readable, and… a bit lifeless. There’s no edge, no tension, no real point of view.

But the best PR has never played it safe. It’s opinionated. It has a voice. It knows when to lean into a moment, when to push a narrative, when to say something slightly uncomfortable because that’s what makes it interesting.

That’s the gap, and it’s where the opportunity sits.

AI is an incredible tool. It speeds things up, helps structure ideas, and can get you from blank page to draft in minutes. But if everyone is using the same tools, trained on the same data, the outputs will inevitably start to converge.

Which means differentiation doesn’t come from the tool. It comes from what you do with it.

For brands and PR teams, that means resisting the urge to over-polish. It means putting personality back into content, even if that makes it a little less “perfect”. It means stronger opinions, more distinctive tone, and writing that actually sounds like a person, not a system predicting the most likely next word.

Because if we start editing ourselves to avoid sounding like AI, we risk losing the very thing that makes content work in the first place.

The em dash isn’t the enemy. It never was.

The real risk is letting AI quietly standardise how we write, until everything starts to blur into one. For PR, that’s not a threat. It’s a reminder.

The brands that stand out won’t be the ones producing the most content. They’ll be the ones that still sound like themselves.

And in a world full of algorithms, that’s a serious advantage.