I am sick of talking about AI. Maybe you are sick of reading about AI. In spite of the fatigue from the last few years of generative language models’ rapid development, I write this article for the very reason of defending this process: writing. AI has no place, and should not have a place, in the future, taking writing away from the hands of humans, no matter how clumsy and slow we may be. I am frustrated by AI’s claim over the em dash, Oxford comma—although I cannot include one for AP Style Guide reasons, please imagine an Oxford comma here—and generally catchy, but ultimately disingenuously, “nuanced” sentence structure. Seriously—give me back my em dash.
Since high school, my writing style has always been somewhat breathless. I enjoy a run-on sentence—though I am working on relying less on them—parentheses (obviously) and generally rambling trains of thought. I love to read them even more. Over break, I read my first Virginia Woolf novel, “Mrs. Dalloway”—as an English major, it could not wait any longer—and I was struck by the lack of traditional punctuation. I could immediately envision each character as Woolf jumped across their perspectives and internal monologues. Her style exemplifies my ideal for the em dash, semicolon and comma as stuttering modes of imperfect punctuation. In contrast to how I have been taught to punctuate liberally for academic papers or articles, Woolf is unafraid to leave out a period—even when the rules of grammar say it might be necessary. It truly felt like I was listening to real people talking and thinking for hours.
This tendency to stutter, to break a sentence mid-thought, to add a clause or adjective for emotional emphasis or for no reason at all is to be human. But take this structure that has become synonymous with AI, what I see to be a disingenuous mimic of this human tendency: not [blank]—but [blank]. Or the rule of three: Three adjectives sound better than two, so AI throws them together with an Oxford comma. As described by one New York Times article, em dashes and trios of adjectives that were once literary, complex and employed in good human writing are now often cast aside as AI giveaways: “…now, no matter where it’s coming from or why, millions of people recognize the em dash as a sign of zero-effort, low-quality algorithmic slop.” Is the solution to avoid em dashes and other AI markers altogether? Or are we really going to give in to the “slop” and simply remove humans from the writing process?
This past week, I attended Sophomore Career Connections and was slightly frustrated to hear how AI, despite its admittedly useful possibilities in healthcare and scientific research, has been used sloppily in corporate jobs otherwise filled by capable, creative humans to save time and money under the guise of efficiency, quality or innovation. Though alumnae/i mentors from both sides of the AI opinion spectrum acknowledged the fact that AI is not advanced enough to fully replace a human writer, let alone a human mind, it was disheartening to hear predictions of its future impacts on the job market. On an advertising and marketing panel, for example, alumnae/i shared that AI can and will be used more and more often to offload certain human projects like writing copy for marketing campaigns, crafting slogans and making social media captions.
I cannot imagine these kinds of projects to be any more suited to a generative large language model (LLM)—such as Gemini, Meta or ChatGPT, hence “Chat” in my intentionally aggravating title—than to a human writer. AI writing is boring. It is hurting the environment, becoming a huge issue in classrooms and I simply can not see its writing as anything more interesting than an adult mad lib: It is plugging in information from human prompts that are unique and interesting because they were made by humans in the first place.
In this sense, I am even more sick of em dashes, Oxford commas and pseudo-nuanced structures being taken as face-value indicators for AI writing. As a student, I am frustrated that professors and teachers might need to look for signs of AI in time that could otherwise be used to provide real feedback. I am frustrated that I hesitate when hovering over my once-favorite dash key because of some strange fear that I will sound too much like AI and not like myself.
I do not want a piece of writing to simply sound like a human wrote it. I want drafts to feel like a human put real time and thought into transposing their thoughts onto the page. Human thought is imperfect. Human writing is imperfect. The writing process is a tumbling series of mistakes. I want there to be inconsistencies. I want there to be contradictions that are not resolved in the next sentence. I want for the feelings that writing evokes to stretch beyond some word count or gift-wrapped, cookie-cutter conclusion.
Em dashes are just one tool to accomplish this bridging of the gap between thought and writing, idea and structure. They emulate a pause of human speech, a break without need for a new sentence. Writing should begin cluttered and incoherent—chopped into pieces and strung back together. Writing should not only be done to sound “good” or to check the box of what is required or assigned by a class or company only 10, 15 or 50 percent faster. It worries me that now, with AI, the standard for human writing will fall—that writing done without LLM assistance will be “good enough” simply when it does not sound like AI.
I do not want to give up reading or writing breathlessly, and I believe experimenting with imperfect structure is part of the writing process as much as it is part of thinking or learning. I will not give AI-generated writing power by fearing away from the em dash. I think we should not forget that AI’s toolbox—how it is trained to predict words that statistically match examples of “good” writing—has been built from human input, not the other way around. I do not want the standard of writing to be perfection or canned endings. That is not what makes beautiful or persuasive or interesting writing.
If you do not have the time or energy to sit down and write something that is worth taking the time to edit—you do not have to write it. But neither should AI. Leave the em dashes and Oxford commas for a moment when you are motivated to use them to experiment and make mistakes. In my experience, that is the most important part of the writing process.