The Tell

You want to know how we used to catch AI writing? The em dash.

I'm serious. For a while that was the whole game. You'd be reading something, a post, an email, a message from someone, and you couldn't say why, but it felt off. Too smooth. Too balanced. And then you'd spot it. That long dash, stitching two thoughts together, and then another one a line later, and another, and you'd just know. Ah. A person didn't write this. A machine did.

It got to where I'd see one and quietly stop trusting the whole thing. Didn't even matter what it said. The em dash had turned into a fingerprint.

And here's the part that actually makes me laugh.

Now, when people want to prove they wrote something themselves, that no AI went near it, you know what they do? They tell the AI: please, whatever you do, don't use em dashes. Or they sit there and pick them out of their own writing, one by one, a mark they'd used their whole life without a second thought, because now it makes them look like a robot.

Think about how backwards that is. The machines learned to write by copying us. They took our habits. They took a perfectly nice, perfectly human little dash. And now we're the ones giving it up, editing ourselves, changing how we write, so nobody mistakes us for the thing that was trying to sound like us in the first place.

We taught them to sound like us. And now we're the ones trying not to sound like them.

I didn't use a single em dash writing this. I kept reaching for one and stopping myself. And honestly? I still can't tell you if that made it sound more like me, or less.