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Notes -
I have discovered, by dint of fucking around, that SwiftKey keyboard for Android allows me to insert em-dashes with relative ease. I'm torn about using them—on one end, they're more expressive than standard hyphens or semi-colons; but on the other, in this climate, that invites accusations of AI writing.
I'm entirely fine with "it's not X, it's Y" becoming deprecated, it's a rather boring turn of phrase, but I'm still annoyed by the fact that I didn't even notice em-dashes as a distinct option before they went out of style.
Am I truly worried? Uh, maybe? My writing style is distinctive enough that it's not trivial to replicate using an LLM. They absolutely won't do it by default.
My girlfriend has noticed ChatGPT's predilection for em-dashes, and now she can't unsee it. Whenever she sees a passage of text which uses them, she assumes ChatGPT was involved in the text's creation, up to and including Teams messages sent by her colleagues (which is honestly not an unreasonable assumption, in my view).
But my concern is the same as yours: I do use em-dashes a fair amount (mostly in fiction rather than non-fiction or blogging), and with exactly one exception I've never used ChatGPT as a writing aid. I'd hate to be accused of doing so without cause.
Occasionally you'll encounter albums where the liner notes include a notice specifying that no pitch correction (e.g. AutoTune) was used on the album, or no synthesizers (more common in the seventies and eighties, less common nowadays). I wonder how soon it'll be before the first novel is published which includes a notice in the front matter to the effect of "No generative AI was used in the creation of this novel".
Your girlfriend still beats the average. I've seen a lot of clearly LLM generated text in circulation on Reddit, and the majority of the time nobody seems able or willing to call it out. Given the average IQ on Reddit, that might even be an improvement.
I find it quite helpful to submit my drafts to the better class of model, they're very good at catching errors, raising questions and so on. I do this for fun, so it's not like I have any plans to pay for a human editor.
When writing non-fiction on my blog, models like o3 are immensely helpful for checking citations and considering angles I've missed. There's nobody I know who could do better, and certainly not for free and on a whim.
You'll find that a lot of artists go out of their way to head off accusations of AI. In some circles, it's standard to submit PSD files or record a video showing you drawing things. Writers and readers don't seem quite as obsessed about it, but I'm sure someone has probably tried.
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