The em dash is under fire. I know where I stand. Will all of my English lit majors rise up with me?
I don’t think I’ve ever written about AI or ChatGPT on my blog before. Until today, I’m not sure I would’ve, if not prompted with annoyance. A work customer sent me an essay written in ChatGPT. They pretended they wrote it. I know they didn’t for one simple reason: they aren’t aware ChatGPT appends a source code on links — of which they sprinkled liberally throughout the essay.
But that’s not why I’m writing this.
My issue isn’t that they wrote it in ChatGPT and passed it off as their own. I’m used to this. I have to un-AI the content people send me every day so that it doesn’t sound like AI wrote it. Because, ahem, AI did write it.
Dropping in a few of your own poorly written sentences here and there doesn’t make it your own creation. That’s like saying you wrote a song not named “Smells Like Teen Spirit” because you changed two chords from the bridge in “Smells Like Teen Spirit” to something else, and voila! Your own song. No.
Everyone, it seems, is using AI to write
As a writer, it’s the world I live in. I have to adapt. I’d be happy if AI didn’t exist. I turn 44 in a little over a month, and for the first 43 years of my life — and the past 33 or so since I started writing around the age of 10 — I’ve gotten along fine without it.
The thing is, after I sent back my rewrite — which took me quite some time to write because, gasp, I didn’t simply paste it into ChatGPT and have it spit back a rewrite for me in 15 seconds — the comment I received back was that it screamed AI.
And why?
Because of the em dash.
Apparently, that’s supposedly a tell-tale sign something was written in AI nowadays. Someone, somewhere on the Internet said so, so it must be true.
What’s next? The comma and the period.
My beloved em dash
The em dash is my favorite punctuation mark. I’ve been using it in terrible love poems since 1993 at a minimum and on the Internet when I started writing on the web dating all the way back to 1997.
If you don’t know what an em dash is, I’ve used it a handful of times already in this piece. It’s this mark (—), basically a very long hyphen, that has more uses than any punctuation mark imaginable.
Here’s an example of me applying it in the title of a blog post back in 2018: Dear literary agent, I wrote a children’s book — call me. And if you were to search for the em dash in this essay, The Single Worst Date of My Life, posted in 2019, you’ll find it a total of nine times.
I didn’t know em dash shaming was even a thing until a week ago when I read this hilarious protest essay by Brian Phillips on the Ringer: Stop AI-Shaming Our Precious, Kindly Em Dashes—Please.
Had the individual simply said, “Hey, can we remove the em dashes?” and left it at that, it wouldn’t have bugged me. It’s the way they did it and the hypocrisy of it all.
Like, bro, you know damn well what you sent me was ChatGPT — just like the plethora of other “original” pieces you’ve sent me over the last few months (I love the ones with a million emojis by the way. Definitely original content). Talk about screaming AI. Hell, it was even coded with ChatGPT in the url referral code. Click the link in your original document and take a peek.
So, that’s what bugs me.
I honestly don’t care at this point if someone uses AI. It’s a losing battle I don’t have the time or energy to fight. For work, I even use it to critique essays when I’m done because we’ve been told outright: “AI won’t replace writers. It’ll replace writers who don’t know how to use AI.”
Doesn’t matter if I disagree with that sentiment or if I think there’s an over-reliance on AI by everyone to just churn out more and more (that’s an understatement).
Message received.
Some of the prompts I commonly use are:
- Identity any jargon or cliched terms.
- Critique for redundancy.
- This is longwinded. Any suggestions for saying this with less words?
- Help me brainstorm an SEO-friendly title.
It’s like my own personal assistant because I prompt the ever-loving s—t out of it for feedback, not output.
But it doesn’t replace my writing because it has no true sense of rhythm or cadence. It has no soul. It’s like a Top 40 radio hit. Yeah, it can pass off as writing to the untrained eye. The Internet is littered with it now.
But it’s no Jimi Hendrix.
It ain’t Don DeLillo.
Nor will it ever be.
But don’t use it, pretend like you’re some masterful writer all of a sudden, then hypocritically call out someone who has decades of writing under their belt — who has been writing on the Internet since before Sam Altman of OpenAI was even a freshman in high school.
Come on, man.
I love em dashes because they can be used a million different ways. Hell, I probably use them wrong half the time when I should be using a different punctuation mark.
I don’t care though.
Because I love my beloved em dash. It’s the most Swiss Army Knife punctuation mark that’s ever existed — and I’ll be damned if I stop using it because AI was trained on the works of Emily Dickinson, James Joyce, and William Faulkner et al — and now thinks (rightly, I may add) the em dash is the bees knees of punctuation marks.
Because it is.
A missed opportunity.
Let me try that again.
And I’ll be damned if I stop using it because AI now thinks (rightly, I may add) the em dash is the bees knees of punctuation marks — because it is.
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