July Writing Challenge- Day 16
Our beloved — is under fire. The moment it’s detected in your writing, it will be marked as AI drafted.
Doesn’t matter if the rest of the stuff— phrases, words and sentences seem robotic or not.
Em dashe has become that friend your mother warned you about.
And I see the issue, one look at LinkedIn and you wouldn’t need help sighting the proliferation of em dashes, something you didn’t quite see before 2023.
But before we risk doubting someone just because of a spurious sprinkling of em dashes, we must understand why the LLMs love it so much.
All LLMs have been trained on human writing, including books, research papers and articles all of which use em dashes quite liberally.
An OpenAI Community Forum analyzing the same reservations mentioned that as em dash wasn’t flagged during AI training as something to avoid or risky, the models never learned to avoid it. Additionally, because of the prolific use of the quotation in formal writing, it became hardwired into their system.
Em dash or not, writing is a human process, the LLMs only mimic that. Your writing is an expression of you—your experiences, thoughts and behavior. If em dashes help articulate them better, by all means, go ahead and use it.
Fingers in symphony 