$1.5 billion. Sounds like a lot of money, doesn’t it? That’s the settlement of a class-action suit filed against Anthropic, a company that downloaded pirated copies of books, including fifteen of mine, to train its artificial intelligence software. When I heard $1.5 billion I hyperventilated for a few minutes. Then I read the fine print. Attorneys get paid first, and publishers will have a share. My portion, converted into coins, is likely to fit inside a medium-sized piggy bank. Still, I’m pleased that a blow has been struck against dishonesty.

Many more suits have been filed against AI companies, but I doubt any will include their effect on the em dash, the longest of the three punctuation marks formed with a horizontal line. Written material containing an em dash is now assumed to be AI-generated. In a weird way, that assumption makes sense. AI was “trained” by professional writers’ work. We use em dashes. Hence, so does AI. But as a professional, em-dash-using writer, I’m caught in a loop: my work looks like my work and therefore resembles AI-generated work designed to mimic my work. Kafka, meet Chat GPT.

Now for the en dash, a slightly shorter line that signifies a strong connection. Sometimes the connection is geographical, describing, say, a train route between Boston and New York. Sometimes it’s personal, referring perhaps to the coordination between pitcher and catcher. Most often, the en dash functions chronologically:

That’s what it’s doing on the stone-paneled wall of a churchyard in my neighborhood. Each slab is incised with a name and a set of dates. A life span! The en dash expresses the strong — in fact, absolute — connection between birth and death. A couple of panels, belonging to the ultra-prepared, show only one date and the en dash, waiting to be completed by an unknown, though certain expiration date. If the em dash has come to signify inhumanity (for what else is artificial intelligence?), the en dash expresses the ultimate truth about humanity. Everyone born will die.

Before the en dash comes for you, I recommend you make the most of every moment — for yourself, and for a world that needs all the help it can get.

Speaking of the world, I have an update to share. Take a look at this photo, which I snapped outside the United Nations in 2015:

For a decade, drivers had to decide which sign to obey — STOP or NO STOPPING. But now all the signage has replaced. NO STOPPING is what drivers are supposed to do. Which means that if the traffic light next to the NO STOPPING sign is red, you should blow right through the intersection. Well, nobody’s perfect.