Leggo My Em Dash
“On em dashes” - Manuel Moreale
As we descend further into the AI-fueled dystopia, and as it continues to devalue anything created by a living, breathing human — unabated by any meaningful regulation or resistance — we are all desperately clambering for a surefire way to tell if something was created using AI or not.
The latest casualty in that search has been the humble em dash — perhaps my personal favorite form of punctuation. I’ve been warned against them, lest my writing be mistaken for AI slop.1
It’s unsurprising that AI writing has em dashes abound, since the writing it stole was trained on was mostly journalism, and journalists also love the venerable em dash.
ChatGPT can keep its nasty handses off my precious punctuation! I’m not giving up any form of punctuation because the robot’s shitty writing is gumming up every aspect of life. If creatives bow to the robot overloads, then humanity has truly lost.
Make no mistake — nothing on this site will ever be written be AI2. Since AI is being used to make music, I’m sure it’s also being used to write blog posts. What a sad existence it must be to commoditize your own self expression.