[JdeBP]

There are quite a few —es on my WWW site and on StackExchange thanks to me; and I vaguely recall that I might even have written one on Wikipedia once. But I am quite happy for you to take the blame for training the LLMs. (-:

[westoncb]

lol no problem. In reality though there's kind of a funny story behind it because I suspect the way I ended up using them so much is similar to how ChatGPT did. When I got into writing I studied grammar, then decided to read a bunch of classics and analyze their usage of punctuation in general until I had a good understanding of every bit of it. Then, in order to practice, I'd apply what I learned to anything I was writing at the time whether journal notes, conversations on AIM/IRC etc. That latter step meant I was translating a lot of casual/natural speech into a form that also had a high level of 'correctness'. And if you faithfully translate natural speech into 'correct'ly punctuated sentences, you end up using a lot of em dashes. Because ChatGPT/LLMs are tuned for natural/authentic style, as well as for a high degree of 'correctness,' you get today's state of affairs. Just a theory.