The age of Sky Net is upon us and, as such, the creative community is all in a dither. Due to the cloak and dagger nature of the internet, AI could be living among us. Hiding. Waiting. Creating painfully generic posts about making money or leaving the internet behind.
However, the more astute among us have discovered tells, chinks in the armor of the treacherous tech that allow the reader to discern whether or not the passage they are reading from was written by a flesh-and-blood human or an AI.
One of these tells is the em dash.
For me, this is quite an issue as I use em dashes quite liberally. Why? Because they look nice. Anyone who has read my work for any period of time can tell I’m fond of my commas, but I have a special, sacred place in my heart for em dashes.
They are so clean. They draw the eye, a tiny island in a sea of words.
In spite of my feelings, I attempted to purge them from my work. I didn’t want to cast any doubt that my words were my own and I didn’t have a robot belch them out for the sake of…I don’t know. Money? Fame? Who can say.
But as time wore on and the AI witch hunts became worse and worse, I realized that it was pointless trying to roll over and show my belly. No, I will not be using AI to write any of my post, nor will I be surrendering my em dashes.
If people think my writing is AI, then they think it’s AI.
At this point it is inevitable that authors will, at some point in their careers, be accused of using AI. It’s the 21st century Red Scare. Even if we creatives adapt and try to distinguish ourselves from AI (at least as far as grammar and formatting is concerned) the software will just catch wise and update itself accordingly.
It’s a bleak prospect, but a realistic one.
The Crooked Pen 
I use em dashes quite a lot, too, so I was amused to see that it’s not supposed to be a sign that someone used AI. I have to admit that most of the AI stuff I’ve been able to identify online as AI doesn’t seem to use em dashes, though. I can mostly tell because it’s wordy and repetitive. And some of it still spits out too many emojis. And sometimes I see similar organizations use the same/similar social media post…
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To be honest, I find it difficult to tell what is AI sometimes. Mostly because a lot of blogs or articles these days are so painfully generic that they might as well have been written by AI. I don’t really use emojiis in my writing, so I guess I’m good there. However, if they begin using memes, I’m done for lol.
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I find it difficult, as well! Often I think, “Oh, this has to be AI.” But then I think, “But what if it’s just really badly written?”
But then there are some accounts I see on social media that I am pretty sure are AI-generated at times because the writing will change and the posts will be longer than normal and incredibly redundant. Whoever is using AI there is not revising it and it’s pretty obvious.
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I, too, like em dashes, though I feel like they sometimes become a crutch to me (not to any other writer, necessarily).
My son, who is in high school, now has to run everything he writes through some app that checks for plagiarism and AI. He has been told that his writing kind of resembles AI writing. I think it’s because he just has a very straightforward style. Of course, this is nonfiction.
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I wonder how that software works and if it’s basically just educated guessing lol.
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It gives you a percentage of how similar you writing is to AI supposedly. So it must be counting frequently used words and sentence structures, or something like that.
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Ah, so it is just educated guessing lol.
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