My basic understanding of em dashes, as of a year ago, was that they landed, somewhere, between dual commas and *asterisks* on the hierarchy of emphatic punctuation. I don’t remember seeing them in everyday social media posts, though; they almost felt reserved to formal prose or reporting.
But now that GPT4 is helping many of us write better — if not also judge whoever’s posts leaves even a whiff of artificial interference — it does beg the question: just how much em should one dash? To find that answer, I went as literarily canon as you can get: Charles Dickens. Lo and behold… 23 em dashes appear in the first stave (chapter) of A Christmas Carol.
And to help illustrate this—I asked an AI. Two of them, actually.
For those unaware, the em dash (—) has quietly become the unofficial mascot of AI-written text. In the last year or so, popular AI tools (like ChatGPT) have been churning out punctuation-rich sentences, and the em dash shows up everywhere.
This ubiquitous character—specifically used without spaces on either side—is now going viral as a supposed tell that “AI wrote this!”
I really value the curiosity- fulfillment that LLMs provide. Those are the text-only AIs like ChatGPT, made by OpenAI, as well as Claude. Claude is another LLM built by former OpenAI researchers who left the company over safety concerns. It’s often considered remarkably better (or maybe just more inclined) for creative writing than ChatGPT.
Mr. Scrooge up there, though? He wasn’t generated by an LLM. He was more broadly generative. Generated?
Anyway, I’ve been skeptical of AI generated video since before this all began, but alas one must try. The images generated by AI can really impress, and they’re pretty quick, so amazing potential for video. By my understanding, the consistency between shots in a fully AI generated video sequence comes from uploading many generated images, as source material, which then are morphed into motion. Most clips are limited to runtimes of 5 or 10 seconds. Here’s how this one was made:
Text: Me
Image: DALL·E 3
Video: Pika 2.2
Audio: Epidemic
Edited in: Express
Produced by: GPT-4o
You never quite know what an AI generator going to conjure up early on. There’s plenty of prompt engineering tips and tricks that I haven’t discovered yet, to hone in style and consistency, but on my first try here’s how the video of ‘scowling Scrooge’ turned out:
It took five more iterations, slightly altering the text input… subtle disgust → no body motion, no camera motion, unimpressed → grumpy man reading unimpressed… to generate a subtle reaction and keeping a static shot, which would ensure a seamless visual loop when it posts online. Maybe that was creative perfectionism; something neither realistically attainable nor remotely cost-effective. Ironically, it reminds me of shooting a film on celluloid — where you can’t responsibly just keeping doing re-takes.
Unlike the LLMs I mentioned, which are about $20/month for as much back and forth conversation as you can handle, the video generation can be much more expensive. A $28 monthly subscription to Pika Pro, the tool I used here, provides enough credits get you 46 of these 5-second clips. There are options besides just morphing an image, which I’ll explore next week with leftover credits, but at 60 cents per shot — even if you nail it each time — is that worth it? Well… yeah.
I started this draft wanting to say no, because I very much feel no about it, but I can certainly imagine a bottom line in the not too distant future that suggest $576 to generate an 80-minute film.
The joy in storytelling through video, for me, has always been passionately fueled by the process of actually capturing it on set. Even in the digital collaboration after — editing, sound, music, color — each artist with a role as distinct and vital as anyone on location. I’m not sure how we’ll retain that collaboration in a world with comparably compressed AI project budgets, but I’m curious as ever to see.
Thanks for reading. If you’d like to be a bit more dashing with your own writing, find out how to properly use the em dash here… also starring the classic hyphen, and a cameo by the illusive en dash. Charles Dickens clearly used AI in his writing, so now you can too.
