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Study: Em-dash frequency in US congressional press releases rises with LLM adoption

By PulseAugur Editorial · [1 sources] ·

A recent study analyzed over 146,000 U.S. congressional press releases from 2021 to 2025 to detect stylistic traces of large language model (LLM) usage. Researchers observed a significant increase in the frequency of unspaced em-dashes, a stylistic feature common in prose but unusual in U.S. press writing, particularly in 2025. This rise, which occurred after the widespread adoption of models like ChatGPT, suggests a growing influence of LLMs on official communications, though the study notes it is a population-level marker rather than a definitive authorship detector. AI

IMPACT Suggests LLMs are subtly influencing official communications, potentially impacting how information is disseminated by government bodies.

RANK_REASON The cluster contains an academic paper analyzing data and presenting findings. [lever_c_demoted from research: ic=1 ai=0.4]

Read on arXiv cs.AI →

AI-generated summary · Google Gemini · from 1 sources. How we write summaries →

Study: Em-dash frequency in US congressional press releases rises with LLM adoption

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The cluster contains an academic paper analyzing data and presenting findings. [lever_c_demoted from research: ic=1 ai=0.4]
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COVERAGE [1]

  1. arXiv cs.AI TIER_1 English(EN) · Przemys{\l}aw Czuma (Polish Association for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine) ·

    The em-dash em-beds in Congress: A population-level rise in em-dash frequency in U.S. congressional press releases at the dawn of the large-language-model era, 2021-2025

    arXiv:2608.05889v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) can leave small stylistic traces in text written with their help. The most discussed is the em-dash (U+2014), especially the unspaced form word---word, which is normal in typeset English prose but unus…

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