We Are the Authors of Our End

For decades, I've used the em dash (—), that Swiss Army knife of punctuation marks, freely in my writing. However, em dash usage is often flagged as an AI tell, and writers like me—creators who’ve long embraced it—now risk being wrongly accused of posting machine-generated prose as our own. For the record: I use the em dash deliberately—especially to spotlight mid-sentence pivots or land a line with punch.

Whoops, that’s four em dashes in rapid succession!

Thanks to that transgression, I can only assume I’m now ostracized from writing communities and flagged as either an AI or a villainous, mustache-twirling user of the technology. If so, then let’s be clear: A longstanding punctuation mark is being wielded as a hammer—one born of fear and suspicion—to fracture a creative community on a global scale.

So-called "AI detectors" wrongly flag human-generated work as machine-generated, and I find that utterly frustrating because much effort from this wholly flesh-and-blood human goes into each creation, only to face suspicion when an em dash is encountered or a paragraph is intricately structured.

In truth, the pursuit of AI writers is a game of chasing the amorphous shadows cast by algorithmic factors and human suspicion. It is a dehumanizing hunt that presents an ill-defined minefield to writers through which we strive to produce work free of the shifting perceptions of AI stench.

The rush to judge our fellow human beings based on the determination of sites with AI detectors drives customer traffic to same-site companion products meant to reformat AI-generated text into something of human creation.

By leveraging—or submitting to—sites with the above tools, AI checking and reformatting utilities become highly profitable by falsely labeling human-generated text as AI creations.

And yet, we humans are falling for what amounts to the classic "bait and switch" sales tactic at the cost of our bank accounts and our fellow creators in laughable fashion.

Curious, I once ran one of my more elaborately constructed articles from the pre-AI era—a piece laden with antithesis, corrective construction, and em dashes aplenty—through an AI checker. I was appalled to see the old, 100% human-generated text was flagged as wholly AI-generated.

Every. Last. Line.

The false positive reinforced my belief that many writers face judgement and vilification due to stylistic choices rather than any actual use of AI, and that point can't be stressed enough.

In closing, our growing revulsion toward AI-made content is proving detrimental to innocent human creators as artificiality nears victory in the battle of minds against mechanisms, and humanity continues to author its own defeat.

~End~

Note: The above is based on comments I made on Medium.

  10 em dashes! I hope an AI checker blows a circuit on this! 

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