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Think you can tell when something has been written by AI? Most Americans aren’t so sure.
A recent YouGov survey polled 1,147 U.S. adults from August 27-29, 2025 about AI and writing. What they found: Americans aren’t particularly confident that they can tell whether AI was used to write something. When asked how well they can detect whether something was written by an AI tool or a human, just 8% said they could do so “very well.” 32% said “somewhat well,” and a similar percentage (27%) said “not very well.” 1 in 7 adults (14%) said “not at all well.”
So, as AI-generated content becomes increasingly difficult for Americans to distinguish, what gives it away?
One clue: the em dash. It turns out that AI tools like ChatGPT frequently use em dashes – a lot more than most people do. According to the same survey, just 15% of Americans said they use dashes “very often” – and more (17%) said they don’t use them at all. Though self-described “good” writers are more likely to use rarer forms of punctuation like em dashes – 54% of self-described “very good” writers use em dashes at least somewhat often, compared to 24% of those who say they’re “not very good” or “not at all good” at writing – their usage in human-created content is still low.
In a digital landscape where AI-generated text is growing harder to spot, the em dash stands out – not because it’s high-tech, but because it’s hardly used by most Americans. Ironically, one of AI’s giveaways might just be its overuse of a punctuation mark adults today barely write.
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