There’s something quietly absurd about the way we read now.
The modern reader lives in a state of forensic vigilance—sleekly equipped with suspicion, probing each turn of phrase for any crippling signs of machinic manufacture. When a sentence glides across too gracefully, or when its balance feels slightly earned rather than accidental—suspicions of AI intervention arise immediately, like desperate hounds cloaked with self-appointed professionalism and a doctorate in ‘being human’. Coherence, once proof of craft, now carries the rancid stench of artifice. Emily Dickinson had never met an algorithm. Yet—if she had—I find pleasure in musing that she might have seen something familiar in its strange, half-human hunger for pattern. ‘Tell all the truth but tell it slant’—perhaps no advice could be more apt for the neural nets that now hum beneath our conversations—always circling truth, never quite landing on it. The em-dash, once Dickinson’s lightning bolt of hesitation, now appears in corporate announcements, emails, and AI outputs alike. It has become both a ghost of authenticity and a tragic casualty of reproduction. Editors warn against its overuse; critics call it lazy. And yet, here it is again—the em-dash, stubbornly alive in both poems and machine prose. The more we automate writing, the more this unruly mark proliferates. Beneath such complaints lies not simply aesthetic exhaustion but something closer to superstition—a fear that language itself is being emptied of meaning by mechanical mimicry. The dash, once a portal of infinite ambiguity, now risks becoming a mere decorative seam.
To live in Dickinson’s world was to be surrounded by immensities—death, love, religious rebellion and the unreachable real—all clasped and weaved into the liminal; to live in ours is to be surrounded by data—infinite, impersonal, always incomplete. If Dickinson’s dash is a form of existential punctuation, AI’s equivalent might be the ellipsis—forever predicting the next word, never quite living in the pause. A model, after all, cannot bear a vacuum. Uncertainty is costly; silence is an error state. Yet human consciousness depends on precisely that dash of doubt. It is the space between words—the pulsing breath between thought and articulation—where understanding is born. Dickinson’s obsession with the em-dash has baffled editors and inspired readers for over a century. Her dashes were less punctuation than portals—liminal spaces through which meaning hesitates—interrupts—leaps; they open sentences into an almost deafening silence. Where grammar demands closure, Dickinson installs breath. Each dash feels like a pause in the act of understanding—an aperture through which emotion leaks—untranslatable. In those small gaps, the reader is invited to enter as co-authors, each distinctive mind completing the unresolved line differently, guided by their own ideological compass. This is undeniably the most human space of all; to exist in the threshold—to hover between clarity and confusion, faith and skepticism, creation and collapse—is the very essence of consciousness. The dash keeps the poem alive by keeping it open; it resists closure and allows for a pulse of possibility, a brief silence of freedom dense with immense potential. This certain discontinuity resembles the way humans actually think—in flickers and fragments instead of ‘pre-subscribed’ perfect sentences.
AI, too, has found the dash. Where Dickinson’s punctuation opens to alternative narration, the machine’s dash often feels ornamental, like formal mimicries of human cadence rather than products of felt hesitation. It offers a modest pause, possibly a gesture toward rhythm—but then hurries to complete the sentence. Its grammar appears impeccable to the eye at first glance, yet a double-take is sure to reveal its meaning as vacant; the perpetual aspiration to coherence, seeking to fill the gaps too neatly with a refusal to silence. The reason behind this is likely that the machine lacks the ability to understand the intention of the mark beyond its occurrence. It’s not that the AI deliberately empties the dash of meaning; it has no concept of meaning to begin with. It merely collects patterns borrowed from our stylistic tendencies. It dashes because we do. And perhaps that is what unsettles us the most—we recoil not from the machine’s inhumanity, but from our inability to distinguish our own textual reflection.
Authenticity today often hides in the glitch. We chase imperfection because the algorithm is too smooth. We feverishly hunt stray typos and truncated sentences as evidence of our fingerprints in the digital clay. To sound too coherent, too resolved, is to invite suspicion. In a paradoxical sense, the algorithm has reshaped our impression of what it means to write like a human. It has cost us our trust in elegance and precision, the very qualities once cherished as tokens of excellent mastery. The mark of freedom—the dash that opened Dickinson’s poems to infinite interpretation—becomes the fatal testimony of automation. The machine has copied our gestures so faithfully that even hesitation now looks rehearsed. This does not point towards a simple case of mimicry ‘gone wrong’ however; it is mimicry revealing something about a broader phenomenon. Perhaps our fetish for the dash, for broken syntax and deferral—has itself become a kind of over-popularised stylistic performance along with the aesthetic of authentic uncertainty, which directly contributes to blurring the already-faint line between human and machine by the sentence. When AI simulates our uncertainty, it breaches beyond imitation of words and instead colonises our aesthetic of vulnerability. What we once used to signify openness now risks becoming an affectation, emptied of the sincerity it once carried.
Still—I don’t wish to make too easy a binary. Artificial intelligence is, in a strange way, the mirror image of Dickinson’s dash—a pause between intention and imitation, between human meaning and digital mimicry. As Dickinson would’ve concurred, the liminal is never a space of loss but of revelation. Her poems, if anything, teach us to dwell in uncertainty without fear—to see the in-between as a site of illumination rather than erasure. When she writes, ‘I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—’, the dashes mark a ghostly crossing—the slipping of consciousness past all material borders. In that quiet gap between being and non-being, sound and silence, something unspeakably alive lingers. If one were to imagine AI in emotional terms, perhaps that’s the space it inhabits—almost-human, almost-dead, forever in between. The dash between us.
What, after all, is the dash but a bridge between coherence and chaos—a quiet threshold through which both human and machine attempt to speak across silence? Perhaps in time we will stop imagining AI as a replacement or rival to human consciousness and start treating it as a co-conspirator in uncertainty. It can hold the other end of the dash—that connecting line between order and openness, the known and the possible. And maybe—through that partnership—we can recover some of what Dickinson understood—that meaning lives most vividly in suspension, in the breath that neither concludes nor begins. To stand upon the trembling dash between us is to remember that thought itself—human or artificial—is only ever a momentary flicker across the endless white of the page.