I used to use em-dashes all the time, same with semicolons, in my academic writing. I love obscure punctuation rules (yes I'm a loser). I've stopped using most of them as AI advanced. Whilst I have a back catalogue of work using them it just wasn't worth the risk of having my work questioned. I'm sad about this AI ruins all the good stuff!
Remarkably, I found a blog where I thought "This sounds like AI" but I wasn't sure, so I went to their back catalogue from decades ago, and the writing was similar so I gave them a pass.
Then I checked the internet archive.
They had replaced all their back catalogue with AI slop.
sigh skip