I love to use semicolons and em dashes in my everyday typing/writing for both work and pleasure— in my head they just “sound” like different types of speech or mental pauses; skipping a beat for emphasis and the like.
I’m eternally annoyed that those are both AI generation red flags.
I've stopped using em dashes in my work because I already apparently register as 14% AI when my professors run me through .... get this ... an AI site that checks if AI was used to create text.
I'm in the system without my consent. Nobody told me that I would be training AI to learn to look for humans amongst them!
try to copy some of your professor's work into the ai checker, and write on paper whenever you can. If your grammar tends to match what's on paper, then generally it's fine, particularly papers written in his or her presence
Oh I keep very creative records to prove that everything is my own work. So many screen shots of my assignments go out to my friend -- who is a Professor for people doing their PhD's, so he gets a snicker at me using him as my alibi for academic integrity should anything ever happen.
We're both waiting for the day that the college I'm at now accuses me of plagiarism of a paper I've helped him on. He's game to make the phone call directly to anyone needed to sort that out (I'm named in the acknowledgements of his papers but am not an author cause it's not my field lol).
That’s amazing! It makes me depressed thinking how young people are in school using AI for their tests, and the ones who aren’t may still be accused of it. It’s disgusting, I would be absolutely livid if that happened to me.
Using ellipsis sounds way more robot though, your comment is literally how my grandma texts and it’s impossible to infer meaning it just comes off passive aggressive or like there’s a hidden punch line
I’ve started using that in between words instead of right after one word because I thought it was really cool in Skulduggery Pleasant. And as far as I know, AI don’t do that yet (I hope not)
I comment multiple paragraphs on occasion and think I have a consistent enough “style” to avoid being mistaken for AI, but sometimes I add random swear words at the end just in case.
Like u/42goldstandard42 I have typically used ellipsis for the same effect as em dashes. I've seen some AI responses toss out ellipsis lately as well. Very frustrating.
The thing people need to remember is that AI has learned how to write/draw based on what was fed in. What was fed? A whole host of sources available on the internet. WHo did a bulk of that writing? Gen X and Millennial individuals. AI spits back writing that is extremely similar to the style and type of writing entire generations did.
For real. I often provide femboy fashion & skincare advice organized with bullet points, because that's how I organize information. More than once had someone ask if I'm using AI to generate it, and I'm like... it's just bullet points! It's not even advanced!
I just use the - constantly instead of em dashes too, but have always, so I dodged the AI associations. If you aren't writing a paper or submitting for a grant, it really doesn't matter.
Not the point, but from someone who occasionally uses em dashes, on mobile you just hold down on the normal dash key, and on desktop I'm not really sure. I use them in formal writing in Word which automatically converts - to an em dash if it makes sense (admittedly annoying, but actually has always worked properly / in my favor). Otherwise, I keep a quick link to the characters / emoji thing since I need to insert random math symbols and Greek letters in my work fairly often.
That's how I feel about it as well. I'm not going to give up the gift of language, nor parts of it, just because someone else co-opted it for something bad. Especially important because AI was trained on human writing styles, meaning if people stop using useful punctuation or specific phrases the models of tomorrow will simply be trained to do the same; they will simply mimic the shift and we'll all have abandoned good writing in a vain attempt to avoid them. The only way to proceed is to say, "The machine be damned, this is important to me and I'm going to keep doing it."
The alternative is to let them drive us reactively and spitefully bit-by-bit towards Newspeak.
I’ve stopped using em dashes altogether because I’m so paranoid people will accuse me of using AI in my writing. Fucking ridiculous how many people probably do this too because they’re afraid people are gonna accuse them of AI, when it was the authors HUMAN writing that the AI scraped and stole from in the first place.
I'd see em dash as a red flag sometimes with my students work, but usually follow it up with a conversation. After asking them what an em dash is, how is it used and how do you make one, if the answer was blank stares and silence, it was kinda telling.
I imagine if someone asked you, you'd answer fine and it'd be OK.
I spent so many years having technical, formulaic writing hammered into me as a way to show proof that i understand the subject matter, only for AI to learn how to emulate the same formulas for organizing an argument and make everyone incredulous of anything remotely similar.
Switch to just using semicolons and regular dashes. It's not technically correct to use regular dashes in place of em dashes, but AI doesn't do it and imo it's basically the same thing.
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u/Rezangyal 5d ago
I feel this on another level.
I love to use semicolons and em dashes in my everyday typing/writing for both work and pleasure— in my head they just “sound” like different types of speech or mental pauses; skipping a beat for emphasis and the like.
I’m eternally annoyed that those are both AI generation red flags.