Note: both of these instances were on Reddit. I’m not sure what the first accusation was based on, but today, apparently my “tell” was that I used emdashes.
For the record, I have never used ChatGPT or any AI, ever. Today, I think the accuser just didn’t care for my observations, but the first time was really out of nowhere. Still, there’s something in the context of “Your post is obviously AI!” that reads to me like, “I can’t write that good, so you must be cheating.” Anyone else ever have this happen?
I have been accused of it by coworkers in documentation I have written. My response was that I also use 2 spaces after periods because I’m old - AI doesn’t do that.
Don’t lie-- You obviously had AI compose the documentation for you because you were lazy, and then went through and manually added an extra space after every period.
Usually it’s not because the writing is “good”, it’s because AI tends to follow certain patterns when it creates content.
Excessive use of em dashes is one of the common tells of AI. ChatGPT and other AI systems just love em dashes and use them significantly more often than a real human would.
Another tell is that AI will make a bunch of points and will then often summarize what it just wrote, where a human would consider the point to be already made and wouldn’t bother summarizing.
Also, when making a bunch of points, AI will often use bullet points, even in casual conversation. Humans don’t tend to use bullet points in that way in a casual post.
AI writing often has a particular cadence that is attempting to emulate human writing, but fails due to the predictable way that it uses it. Once you get familiar with AI posts it is very easy to pick up on this cadence.
AI tends to use excessive bolding and italics in a way that humans don’t.
When people recognize these patterns, they get annoyed that it’s AI slop and not a real post. They aren’t complaining because the writing is better than what they could produce on their own. In my experience, the only people complaining that AI is so much better than what they could do are lazy students who need to write a paper for school.
If Rilchiam is smart enough to use AI, using Find and Replace (period + space replaced with period +2 spaces) is not out of the question so as to be even more lazy.
The em dash accusation is pretty funny. I was recounting a story at work last week that featured them. A couple of years ago, I received an incorrectly addressed email inviting me to a family reunion in the US. I sent a joking reply to say that not only would I not be coming but someone else may feel like the black sheep of the family having not been invited at all. This prompted a few responses from family members, some suggesting that I would be welcome there as a new Australian arm of the family.
One lengthy and funny response featured the appropriate use of em dashes. In my response I suggested that the writer must have a background in writing or publishing to have bothered to not simply use a hyphen. It turned out that he was the retired owner of a magazine and his wife is a published author. I suppose nowadays I would just have accused him of using AI.
There’s also a tendency towards comparison by negation - “It’s not X, it’s Y” or “It’s not just about X, it’s about Y, Z, and W” is a pretty common tell.
On the other side of this, I have had many, many instances where I question whether something online was AI-written. There’s something I cannot define that suggests AI content, which I guess is feeling that something is “too perfect” but also mediocre and not as interesting as it sounds.
(That’s certainly not you, Rilchiam!)
I’m willing to allow that some people just write like that, but I also have to consider that AI-style writing is affecting how people write original posts. So they might be mimicking the style rather than having AI generate content.
At any rate, it’s weird and somewhat dystopian when you routinely doubt what’s human or not.
If it makes you feel any better, my fictional dialogue is full of em-dashes. And AI probably wouldn’t do it so much if it weren’t trained on humans doing it.
I’m not a native English speaker and I know emdashes are not really necessary. But I eventually learned how to use them, especially instead of brackets. Now I avoid them altogether again.
You know, I don’t really care if someone on social media is writing using AI. Who cares? It’s their own skills they’re letting rot. Really, some of the crap I’ve seen on social media could use a little AI to make it semi comprehensible. Now professional writing or student writing needs to be original and unique to the writer.
It feels to me like AI accusations are another way of not interacting with the content of the post/comment/whatever, but criticizing the style of the writing rather than engaging with the actual contet.
I edited this to try and fix an incredibly akward sentence - and I didn’t use AI eiither!
I didn’t even know emdashes were a thing until they started getting trotted out as a tell of AI writing. It’s not on a standard keyboard and I’ve always just used a hyphen in my writing - like so - to indicate a pause or a digression.
According to my daughter, who knows this stuff much better than I, classical literature used emdashes. Classical in this case meaning “stuff in the public domain,” which was what was first used to feed AI.
Of course, I’m of the generation that was taught that hyphens and (em)dashes were different punctuation and were designed for different uses, and by the way, our papers would be marked down if we used them incorrectly. I was also taight to double space after a period at the end of the sentence, so I’m just barely hanging on to competency with the written word.
