Also, for sheer delightful perversity, I ran the above comment through Copilot/ChatGPT and asked it to revise, and this is what I got. Note the text structuring and how it has changed! (And how my punctuation games are gone, but we expected that.)

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For me, the issue is that they’re misused in this piece. Em dashes used as appositives carry the feel of interruption—like this—and should be employed sparingly. They create a jarring bump in the narrative’s flow, and that bump should only appear when you want it. Otherwise, appositives belong with commas (when they’re integral to the sentence) or parentheses (when they’re not). Clause breaks follow the same logic: the em dash is the strongest interruption. Colons convey a sense of arrival—you’ve been building up to this: and now it’s here. Semicolons are for those rare cases when two clauses can’t quite stand alone as separate sentences; most of the time, a full stop is cleaner. Like this. Which is why full stops should be your default splice when revising.

Sprinkling em dashes everywhere—even if each one is technically correct—feels like AI writing. The system has learned what they are, how they work, and when they fit, but it hasn’t learned how to revise for overall flow or density. The result is too many dashes, when the right number should be low, because they’re heavy emphasis—true interruptions.

(And yes, the quirky three-point bullet list with bolded openers and a punchy closer at the end is another hallmark of AI prose.)

But hey, I guess I fit the stereotype—I’m in Seattle, and I hate AI too.