We love a Mean Girls reference around here.
I’m not going to act like being anti-generative A.I. is a bold stance for a fiction writer. I’m fairly certain that several of my works at least have been scraped and I’m bitter, plus I think that doing the work is its own reward. Ars gratia artis and all that.
Now A.I. is taking something else from us writers, those of us who love punctuation and grammar on its own terms, who seek out new words and phrases like an Intrepid Class Starship in the Shackleton Expanse on the hunt for first contact.
Our reputation.
There are so many A.I. detectors out there, and they’re well-intentioned I’m sure. In fact, I know they are. They are a last-ditch effort to force people to think for themselves. Sometimes you get in a little bit too deep and need someone to scare you straight. Someone like an A.I. detector.
There’s one really big problem with these things, which is that while they are trained on A.I., A.I. is trained on something else entirely: literature.
It’s known at this point that L.L.M.s have scraped the internet for content. A big early contributor to this was independent self-published authors, most of whom had their work pirated by these companies in one form or another so that they were not even compensated the cover price by billionaire tech bros.
The thing about writers is that we are those starships, and we act like it. We make up excuses for weird words. We create metaphors that sound like fever dreams.
We use em-dashes.
I have a friend who teaches writing. I always feel I am following her around like a puppy, soaking up whatever writing wisdom she bestows, which is invariably delivered in the most aw-shucks-little-old-me deprecative tone to belie its value. She has a particular passion for em-dashes, and every few weeks I hear that she has once again taken class time to proclaim their importance to her students. I think it’s lovely, to be that focused on something so small. It is a sign of a genuine passion, akin to hobbies like birdwatching or model trains. A hyperfocus of an interest that obsesses on the minutiae because only such an enthusiast could know their value (and proper deployment).
An em-dash is a beautiful thing.
It expresses a complex thought — whatever is to follow could not be contained in a simple sentence. It can substitute for many things — colons, emphasis, parentheses, lists. It can break up sentences — unwieldy things more often than not — without breaking the stream of consciousness.
You see what I mean.
Em-dashes communicate thoughts that A.I. cannot truly have. Obviously it can imitate them — otherwise there would be no em-dashes for it to use. But it is simulating those thoughts. It is pulling them from elsewhere. You don’t know where because you haven’t read that book, or it’s too subtle for you to remember. But that just makes it look like magic. It’s no more magic than an illusionist’s trick. It’s just making sure you don’t see what’s behind it.
But many of these A.I. detectors are trained on things like em-dashes. In fact they’ve become a little notorious online as a “sure-fire” A.I. indicator. Which means lowly wordsmiths like us, those who want to use an em-dash just because we think it’s neat, are at risk of being lumped in with the slop flooding our world.
I’ve gotten a little indignant at this, I’ll admit. How dare Silicon Valley’s arrogantly insipid class of modern carpetbaggers take this from me? How dare they shred another scrap of joy off my humdrum life? You will pry my em-dash from my cold, dead hands.
But I think it’s an important thing to be indignant about! I’m using exclamation points, I feel so strongly about this!
Don’t let the em-dash stop you from doing your thing!
Write freely and well. Experiment with language. Show me something I’ve never seen before — something that could only exist in a world where the finer points are observed and even treasured.
Write like generative A.I. doesn’t exist. Maybe someday it won’t.
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