I banned the em dash from my AI's voice

说明与用途

作者通过在重写工具中添加基于标记的禁用规则、预部署门脚本以及更新 AI 提示，消除了 AI 生成内容中的所有 em‑dash，从而提升了风格一致性并防止了机器化写作。

问题

The AI-generated content repeatedly used em dashes, a stylistic marker that the author never uses and that signals machine prose.

结果

The author eliminated all em dashes from AI-generated content, improving stylistic consistency and preventing machine-like prose. The gate prevented any future violations, ensuring compliance automatically.

工作流

• 1. Added a banned-words rule to hyphos with token mode for em dashes.
• 2. Updated the rule to match literal dash tokens and flag them.
• 3. Implemented a shell script (no-dash-check.sh) to scan all content before upload.
• 4. Added the ban to the AI prompt for the weekly digest.
• 5. Rewrote existing drafts, replacing each dash with appropriate punctuation (colon, comma, semicolon, new sentence).
• 6. Tested the rule with self-tests and site gate to ensure no dashes slip through.

证据

The rule matched on word boundaries, and a dash is not a word, so it could never fire.

来源

The gate proved itself within a day, and against me. On the first of September a description line on one page carried a single dash, and every deploy for the next twenty-four hours refused.

来源