My editor\u2019s email started off friendly enough, but then came the hammer blow: \u201cWe need you to remove all the em dashes. People assume that means it\u2019s written by AI.\u201d I looked back at the piece I\u2019d just written. There were dashes all over it\u2014and for good bloody reason. Em dashes\u2014often used to connect explanatory phrases, and so named because they\u2019re the width of your average lowercase \u2018m\u2019\u2014are probably my favourite bit of punctuation. I\u2019ve been option + shift + hyphening them for years.<\/p>\n
A person\u2019s writing often reflects how their brain works, and mine (when it works) tends to work in fits and starts. My thoughts don\u2019t arrive in perfectly rendered prose, so I don\u2019t write them down that way. And here I was being told the humble em dash\u2014friend to poorly paid internet hacks everywhere\u2014was now considered a sign not of genuine intelligence, but the other sort. The artificial sort. To the extent that I have to go through and manually remove them one by one, like nits. The absolute cheek. Not only am I losing my livelihood to AI\u2014I\u2019m losing grammar too.<\/p>\n
Why couldn\u2019t machines have embraced the semicolon? No one gives a fig about those.<\/p>\n
The reason AI is so hung up on em dashes\u2013as you might expect\u2013is because humans were first. Large language models were trained on vast swathes of actual writing, including mine, I suppose, with the result that em dashes got baked into algorithms from the beginning. It\u2019s flattering, in a way. \u201cHumans used them so often that AIs learned them as a default natural flow,\u201d Brent Csutoras notes on Medium<\/a>. \u201cIt\u2019s like asking a bird not to chirp.\u201d<\/p>\n Well, my chirping days are over. It seems I have two choices now\u2014keep using em dashes with a sort of stubborn, curmudgeonly pride until all my clients stop exchanging money for words, or start writing incredibly long run-on sentences, like this, with commas all over the place \u2026 and maybe ellipses too; ideas connected by semicolons. Staccato flow. Full stops everywhere. Nope, that sucks too. Sounds like someone flicking between radio stations.<\/p>\n Oh, em dash\u2014what will we do without you?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"My editor\u2019s email started off friendly enough, but then came the hammer blow: \u201cWe need you to remove…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":181287,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-181286","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181286","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=181286"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181286\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/181287"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=181286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=181286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=181286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}