A Little Extra Em—phasis
By now—you've probably heard that text generated by a large language model AI can be easily identified by its use of em dashes—the really long hyphens that somebody typically has to go out of their way to actually use. More than likely—you heard this in the form of bemoaning from a human writer who does—in fact—regularly use em dashes.
If you've been reading Skep's Place for long enough—you may have noticed that I'm one of these writers. I love the em dash. I use it so often that I have the Alt—code memorized—and typing on a keyboard without a number pad is an inordinately frustrating experience anymore.
However—I'm not actually upset at this news. For one—my tone is so unique (i—e—torturous) that AI can't yet properly emulate it. For two—now that the cat is out of the bag—everybody is going to either be scouring their outputs for em dashes and scrubbing them out—or altering their prompts so the LLM doesn't use them. The "problem" will resolve itself.
Still—if you are determined to sufficiently differentiate yourself from the machines while still holding on to your most beloved of punctuation marks—why not go the opposite direction with it? "Too much of a good thing is a great thing"—so they say—so the most reasonable solution is to pepper in a few more em dashes—really make it clear that they are being thoughtfully inserted by a human. The best part is—because the em dash is such a strong piece of punctuation—it actually makes your writing increasingly elegant the more of them you put in. In fact—I bet you didn't even notice how many I'd included in this post until I brought attention to it—did you? But to anybody reading with even the barest hint of criticism—there can be no doubt that this text was not generated by an algorithm.
Of course—this will only last so long. Even as you read this—crawlers are scraping this text and feeding it to the LLMs—meaning that they will eventually adapt. Even people performing statistical analysis on the em—dash—per—word count won't be able to distinguish the author anymore. By necessity—language will evolve faster than ever before—as new—unique methods of standing out from the mass—produced bilge are employed to stay one step ahead of the robots.
I—for one—am excited to see what other interesting methods we'll cook up in our fight to retain our human dignity. For example—perhaps it's finally time to bring the interrobang into mainstream use. Now—wouldn't that be something‽