Dear Everyone,
Please stop using the em dash as your litmus test by which to decide a piece of writing is A.I. generated. An em dash is a perfectly normal part of writing and has been for a very long time. My publisher’s style guide utilizes em dashes. I have had to learn how to use them correctly and—hopefully—effectively. *
If you want to know if something has been written by a Large Language Model (for that is what they really are) and the author has not been kind enough to copy and paste a prompt along with their bot text, just consider a few simple tells.
Does an Instagram post use the word “highlighting”, “emphasizing”, or “contrasting” after a very banal description of the image or video, and proceeding a very didactic description of the zeitgeist of the post? It was written by an L.L.M.
Does the text appear to have a generous helping of thesaurus sprinkled on top of it? Every grade school teacher I had knew that too many “fancy” words was a dead giveaway that their student spent more time reading the thesaurus than the actual book they were writing about. You don’t have to have read a thousand theme papers to spot the difference. Is the text too perspicacious, effervescent, obsequious or even audacious? It was written by an L.L.M.
Does the text look like a word salad that bears a striking similarity to a literary meal you’ve consumed before? I have been solicited by a number of people offering promotional services for authors. Their lengthy—praise riddled—emails are peppered with words that have been used across the internet to describe my books, my writing style, and me. Even if I hadn’t carefully selected most of those words myself, the generic nature of each sentence, the hollow way in which my own words have been used, tells me that there is no genuine thought or consideration behind them. Does the text look like some kind of autotuned remix of a familiar classic? It was written by an L.L.M.
Look at the words. Consider what meaning they carry, in and of themselves, and in the way they’ve been presented to you. The human mind behind them, or lack thereof, isn’t hard to spot.
Image thanks to @schulzmuseum
* I fully embrace the irony if I haven’t used those em dashes correctly. My blog doesn’t have a line editor.
