a subject that is close to my heart as I've been accused recently of being AI by someone who evidently didn't like what I wrote.

Admittedly it did make me chuckle that they thought AI sounds like a depressed character in science fiction, which was what I was writing. Poor AI.

I do use my share of em-dashes but hardly ever use the word delve, unless discussing something that Adam and Eve did, or if I were to write about Dwarves, Kobolds, Lovecraftian horrors and their worshipers because in those cases I would expect delving to occur.

An excellent question! First of all...

I used to use a grammar and punctuation checking browser plugin that worked in any text box. Among all the normal suggestions, it would always insist that instead of using a - dash, that it was proper to use an — emdash. I would accept the suggestion until people on Reddit accused me of being chatgpt because I wrote "too properly" with emdashes. So now you can't do that anymore.

> Could there be anything more insulting for a writer than someone assuming that their writing is an output of generative artificial intelligence?

Not sure if this is a bad thing. AI uses very professional and correct language (unless otherwise instructed) with well-structured paragraphs. If a system can't distinguish my writing from AI, it means that I'm doing a great job as humans sometimes make typos and structural/grammatical errors and AI generally excels against those.

Was this written by AI?

Mostly not. I am a fan of the em-dash, which a lot of people now see as absolute evidence of LLM usage. I occasionally think about swapping it out if I’m desperate not to be mixed up with an LLM, but in principle, I don’t really care if someone thinks I used an LLM to help me write something or not.

I work with a lot of non-native English speakers (with English as a lingua franca) and I’m more than happy for them to use LLMs to help them phrase their thoughts in a way that I can understand more easily.

I also sometimes use LLMs myself for low-stakes stuff, tidying up sloppy notes, etc.

I think it’s a bit Ludditical to want people to always write every word themselves. Should they also hand write it using a quill pen and ink they made themselves from oak galls?

There are some types of writing (creative writing, writing to persuade, etc) where the writing itself benefits from being hand crafted, but most writing is just an imperfect way of sharing thoughts.

I've definitely stopped using hyphens - so, yes!

AI writing will be impossible to distinguish from human writing in a year or two. The weird crappy way it writes now will be adversarially driven out of it in the next LLM releases, and probably gone in one or two more.

No more lists of 3 things, no more emdash, no more vacant live laugh love level vapid niceties.

Sometimes I'll read comment online that does the equivalent of breaking my "willing suspension of diabelief" by sounding just like a standard gpt reply. I even slipped up and commented as much, which is not in itself an interesting comment , just because it was so jarring to read. But idk what it is about reading something lexically equivalent to injection molded plaatic that feels so annoying, plastic is great! But maybe it's similar to the feeling of buying an upcharged "branded" Alibaba product on Amazon. I can't trust the reseller on the basis of their effort because I don't know them and it's just as likely they put 0 effort into quality control (thoughtful selection, validation).

But in the end, like the article implies, any comment could be "manufactured."