Accusations of writing being AI are becoming more common – an irony so rich it could fund Silicon Valley for another decade. We’ve built machines to detect machines imitating us, and then we congratulate ourselves when they accuse us of being them. It’s biblical in its stupidity.
A year ago, I read an earnest little piece on ‘how to spot AI writing’. The tells? Proper grammar. Logical flow. Parallel structure. Essentially, competence. Imagine that – clarity and coherence as evidence of inhumanity. We’ve spent centuries telling students to write clearly, and now, having finally produced something that does, we call it suspicious.
My own prose was recently tried and convicted by Reddit’s self-appointed literati. The charge? Too well-written, apparently. Reddit – where typos go to breed. I pop back there occasionally, against my better judgment, to find the same tribunal of keyboard Calvinists patrolling the comment fields, shouting ‘AI!’ at anything that doesn’t sound like it was composed mid-seizure. The irony, of course, is that most of them wouldn’t recognise good writing unless it came with upvotes attached.
Now, I’ll admit: my sentences do have a certain mechanical precision. Too many em dashes, too much syntactic symmetry. But that’s not ‘AI’. That’s simply craft. Machines learned from us. They imitate our best habits because we can’t be bothered to keep them ourselves. And yet, here we are, chasing ghosts of our own creation, declaring our children inhuman.
Apparently, there are more diagnostic signs. Incorporating an Alt-26 arrow to represent progress is a telltale infraction → like this. No human, they say, would choose to illustrate A → B that way. Instead, one is faulted for remembering – or at least understanding – that Alt-key combinations exist to reveal a fuller array of options: …, ™, and so on. I’ve used these symbols long before AI Wave 4 hit shore.
Interestingly, I prefer spaced en dashes over em dashes in most cases. The em dash is an Americanism I don’t prefer to adopt, but it does reveal the American bias in the training data. I can consciously adopt a European spin; AI, lacking intent, finds this harder to remember.
I used to use em dashes freely, but now I almost avoid them—if only to sidestep the mass hysteria. Perhaps I’ll start using AI to randomly misspell words and wreck my own grammar. Or maybe I’ll ask it to output everything in AAVE, or some unholy creole of Contemporary English and Chaucer, and call it a stylistic choice. (For the record, the em dashes in this paragraph were injected by the wee-AI gods and left as a badge of shame.)
Meanwhile, I spend half my time wrestling with smaller, dumber AIs – the grammar-checkers and predictive text gremlins who think they know tone but have never felt one. They twitch at ellipses, squirm at irony, and whimper at rhetorical emphasis. They are the hall monitors of prose, the petty bureaucrats of language.
And the final absurdity? These same half-witted algorithms are the ones deputised to decide whether my writing is too good to be human.
Philosophics 