Jeff Auriemma and Janice Wilson have had enough. In March 2026, the two published RFC 454545 — Human Em Dash Standard on GitHub Gist, a satirical proposal to create a new Unicode character that only humans can type. The joke lands because the problem is real.
The Human Em Dash (HED, U+10EAD) looks exactly like a regular em dash. That's the point. LLMs love em dashes — deploy them constantly, confidently, without the existential hesitation that supposedly marks human writing. The RFC proposes encoding a separate character that carries proof of human origin. To qualify, a writer must first produce a verifiable Hesitation Event: a pause over 137 milliseconds, a backspace, a cursor repositioning, or — the document is generous here — audible sighing. Just prove you thought about it.
The spec is formatted like a real IETF memo, RFC 2119 language and all. MUST. SHOULD. MAY. Before each HED, writers must insert a Human Attestation Mark (HAM, U+10EAC), which renders invisibly. Automated systems MUST NOT emit it. The authors are clearly having fun, but the document is airtight enough to sting.
It also names something that had no name before: Dash Authenticity Collapse, or DAC — the paranoia that grips human writers who worry their prose will be mistaken for output. The proposed cure is Human Cognitive Proof-of-Work: demonstrated through incongruous emoji usage or expressions of personal values or accountability. Commenters on the Gist spotted the obvious exploit immediately — just instruct an LLM to swap in HAM+HED. The authors anticipated it. The Security Considerations section warns implementors to watch for 'excessively consistent hesitation intervals' and 'uncanny servility.'
What makes the piece stick is that the joke is also the argument. Every tool built to tell human writing from machine output gets gamed fast — watermarks, detectors, stylometric classifiers. The em dash became an LLM tell precisely because LLMs learned it from humans, who now worry they write like machines. The acknowledgments put it plainly: the em dash 'did nothing to deserve this.'