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I love em dashes and have always used them. If I ever get falsely accused of using AI I’ll send them to my portfolio as proof.
Also not one of those supposed AI detection programs are accurate. They ding you as an AI user for using correct grammar, structure, and punctuation for Christ’s sake. It’s why colleges stopped using them.
Em dashes aren’t enough to make that call on their own, so that’s kind of silly. Though I’ve started using them less just knowing it’s in all that AI slop.
Might need to consider doing that myself.
1. Any cd with the bandwidth to nitpick through copy looking for ‘AI flags’ and then take the time and effort to stage a confrontation over a few em-dashes does not enough work to justify their desk.
2. ai companies literally hired copywriters to train LLMs like chat gpt. we don’t “sound like AI,” AI sounds like us.
Wagging the dog.
I use em dashes when I need some long pause drama. Been a lover of em.
I use AI to spam myself some ideas.
You could always tell the AI not to use em dashes...
It sounds like they didn't use AI and are frustrated their work is getting flagged as such
Wtf is ai artifacts? These people.
Unfortunately most people are paying attention to AI juuuust enough to be afraid of it, and not enough to actually know anything about AI artifacts. They pick those ideas up from Medium articles (that were written by AI lol) and try to pass them off as being educated on the topic. It gives them a sense of control in a world that's changing fast, so they cling to it really tightly.
I also used em dashes liberally in my early portfolio. Now, I limit them to one per email tops bc I have also been "flagged." Meanwhile, people miss 98% of actual AI cliches/artifacts lol. They don't realize that their confidence in their own AI radars or that of the AI checkers is not just misplaced, it's an exposition of how little they understand writing or know about the topic at all.
...see what I did there?
I tell people that these words and sentence structures are common in AI bc they're common in general. The AI was trained on real writing. And they're common in real writing bc they work. So there's no shame in using an em dash or parallel structure or dichotomy once in a while. These days it's all about balancing concentration.