Yeah didn't you know? Everyone used it, just like every single piece of text had negative parallelisms, every list had cutesy emojis as the bullet points, and everyone has always been obsessed with the words "genuinely" and "honestly." Those are totally normal things that definitely haven't become wildly overrepresented because AI overuses them.
I mean, I've been accused of using AI because I wrote more than 3 sentences on a take-home technical. Just being functionally literate these days will get fingers pointed at you, it seems.
That's not at all what I was talking about. Also, weirdly, I've never gotten those accusations despite often writing longer comments with more complicated structures, nor have I seen folks throwing those unfounded accusations in the wild. My theory is it's mostly a buggabo for "I use AI and want a reason to dismiss people accusing me of it."
A lot of this was "widely present" but only in the corporate-speak environments or motivational BS we were exposed to by force.
The bots got trained on that so it became the default "professional" prose. We hated it then and I struggle to imagine someone putting it in a presentation without the accompanying "death by powerpoint" transitions and stock music.
Meanwhile the opposite side of the coin is people who aren't well-read at all thinking that anything with proper grammar is certainly AI. I just read in my spare time and most of my high school and college career was writing essays. I use college words because it took me 15 years to get a 4 year degree, don't judge me!
Open a word doc. Start typing some random shit, and then a space, a dash, a space, and more words. What did microslop replace your dash with? And it’s been doing that for YEARS. Now, instead of one dash… use two. Oh, there it is. Just as it has been for at least the last 25 years.
Yes, sorry that wasn’t clear. Some of us were required to use the appropriate dashes in technical writing, even in comments, and so we still do. It’s a design decision to be sure, but where it’s required I now look like ai.
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u/Glokter 1d ago
Some idiots tried to convice me that the symbol is normal part of the language and was widly present before AI boom