Writers now strip out choices they like to avoid sounding like AI slop.

Precise and polished writing used to signal care, but now can trigger doubt.

Without an explicit AI label, people are trusting; when labeled AI, writers suffer the penalty.

We default to belief, but how honest someone seems barely tracks how honest they are.

I spent four minutes staring dead into the eyes of an em dash.

It was sitting in the second paragraph of a different article I was working on, minding its own business, holding open a pause that my sentence really needed. But I stared at it like it was insulting my mother, and then I deleted it before putting it back in. Then I deleted it again and rebuilt the sentence around the lowly comma, which was much worse, and I knew it was worse the whole time I was doing it.

An editor told me a while back that em dashes are one of the ways she “knows” when the writing came from a bot. Looking around the internet these days, I get it. Suddenly em dashes are everywhere! So now every time I reach for one, a second thought slams up against the first: Oh crap, this is going to look like I didn’t write this. So I swap in something duller, and I feel slightly worse about myself, and I carry on with the rest of the day.

I wasted how long thinking about punctuation? I am a frequent writer. I have a Ph.D. I’ve always admired the mighty em dash, and I’ve reveled in its use since about 1989.

And then I learned that the em dash isn’t even the tell anymore. Go figure. The Economist ran a study this summer comparing the leading AI models against human writing and found that most of them now use fewer em dashes than we do. The machines seem to have moved on months ago, but I’m still out here rewriting perfectly good sentences to duck an accusation that has stopped being accurate.

What makes this even weirder is that I’ve caught myself........

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