While the article could very well be slop (and I'm not defending it either way, also fuck the CEO of microsoft), it's very common for (actual) journalists to use the emdash, that's where the models likely picked it up from to begin with. I hesitate to use the emdash alone as an indicator for slop. When it's paired with lists, lots of bold, over embellishments, and common slop phrases ("but here's the thing", "everything changed", "marking a pivotal moment", "the transformative power", "further enhancing", "pivotal", etc), then I start to think that it's LLM slop. Wikipedia has a great page on how to spot common slop. It also mentions that one of these is not necessarily a sign of slop, but when there's a lot of these together it definitely can be.

The statement from the CEO is almost certainly LLM slop.

"it has em dashes" is the worst reason to assume something came from an llm

The biggest injustice I had to endure due to AI is my proud keyboard setup which enabled me to use emdashes and correct quotation marks liberally becoming useless unless I want ppl to think it's AI writing...