Anirudh Week 3: The Death of the Em Dash
After two really formal blogs, I’m deciding to do something a bit lighter (partly because I do not want to redo a bunch of analysis I would have to do with something like critical theory). So for this blog post, I’m going to talk about the em dash—a key part of writing that has largely disappeared in human-produced texts (I know I was a bit hypocritical by using it just now). So to get to the crux of the disappearance of the em dash, we need to kind of travel back into evolutionary biology and this concept of accusation anxiety. We as humans naturally want to be in a safe spot if we have a choice. Thus, we would avoid anything that might get us accused of something, e.g., stealing from someone.
But what does stealing from someone have anything to do with the em dash, you may ask? Well it has to do with the emergence of Large Language Models—or text-based Artificial Intelligence, and how they tend to write. LLMs are often trained on high-Lexile, prose-like training data, and because em dashes appear so frequently and are often rewarded as a stylistic choice, models tend to overuse them. It also has to do with the deeper grammatical use of the em dash. The em dash is incredibly versatile. It can be used in place of commas, parentheses, colons, and sometimes even periods. And by utilizing em dashes, LLMs can satisfy the grammatical requirements needed in a sentence while also serving a more meaningful purpose—like comparing, contrasting, explaining, or qualifying something. So when ChatGPT became REALLY popular in late 2022, I found myself a bit scared of potential “AI accusations”. I actually used to kind of over-utilize em dashes myself back then, but seeing em dashes being categorized as what people called a “sign of AI writing” really freaked me out. So I stopped using them altogether.
Just like that.
But recently, the switch to handwritten assignments has given me the opportunity to make full use of em dashes to my stylistic preferences. So while my grammatical utilization can be error-prone sometimes—as I restarted pretty recently—it’s definitely made my writing feel more “me” in a way that I don’t think my writing without them would.
There's a place I do work at and they made everyone take some training classes. Absent people had to watch the video recording and take handwritten or typed notes and send it in to be checked. One poor guy sent in his video notes, which got rejected by our management! The reason being that they were "written by AI." I have no idea who or what made that judgement, but that guy retorted that his notes were completely original and not made using a chatbot... and they relented, giving him credit for his work.
ReplyDeleteIt's frustrating nowadays that we have to worry sometimes about if people will perceive our writing as created with AI, and not our own beautiful ideas. People from a decade ago could write in any way they wanted and not have to worry about being falsely called out as a bot, because AI didn't exist back then!
Keep chugging along, Ani, and don't let no one bother you because em dashes help your writing style!
As a fellow em dash lover/overuser, this was pretty relatable to read about! When I first heard about the em dash as a tell for A.I. use, I said that everyone could “pry em dashes out of my cold, dead hands.” I was convinced that if someone read my writing, they would be able to tell that I had put thought and brainpower into it regardless of em dash inclusion. However, I didn’t account for the rise in A.I. checkers that tended to flag em dashes. There was a bit of a cheating scandal in my English class last year, where some 80% of submissions of a 7 page personal narrative essay were flagged as A.I. Even though I knew I didn’t use it, my mind immediately went to the em dashes I had included throughout the paper and wondered if I had been one of the people flagged. I still don’t know to this day, my teacher never told us!
ReplyDeleteIt does feel like a witch hunt sometimes. While normally I view the switch to handwritten assignments more annoying than anything (I tend to lose them) I didn’t think about how much stylistic freedom it gives back! I’ll try to remember that next time I’m shuffling through a stack of papers during a timed write, and hopefully it’ll make me feel better.
Funnily enough, I never really used em dashes before the rise of AI because I simply never saw them used that often (not meaning I use AI though!!). After hearing about the problems that you and others had about losing something, I had surprisingly gained something! I do agree that the AI accusations and detectors were, and still are, pretty scary, especially when people would get publicly called out for it in class. I vividly remember my freshman English class and a boy getting called out of class because he was supposedly writing with AI. This, of course, freaked me out; but em dashes are too good to permanently remove, that's why AI uses them so much! Especially with the timed writes you mentioned, the “AP phoning position” really helps get rid of any cheating allegations. While AI can try to take your em dashes, it cannot take your own creative writing ideas!
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