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Jurgen Appelo's avatar

Just strip the text of anything that isn't you. I don't remove em-dashes because I use plenty myself. But I remove other typical stylistic issues, such as:

Here's the kicker:

Here's the truth:

Spoiler alert:

These phrases are typical for AI (in my subjective opinion) and I remove them all because that's not how I write. Also a single word followed by a question mark and then a short sentence:

Managers? They find themselves fired.

I rewrite that too.

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Alberto Romero's avatar

That? I really hate when it does that.

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Jurgen Appelo's avatar

Spoiler alert: they all seem to do this.

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Jamaal Glenn's avatar

Thanks for this. AI is new and scary and making us uncomfortable. The false belief that the em dash is an AI detector merely helps us cope with that underlying discomfort. The truth is the em dash looks foreign because the internet has caused us to write less, write less formally, and be less exposed to formal writing. It is a widely used and effective form of punctuation. As AI becomes more embedded in how we work and as we become more comfortable with it, we’ll forget these moments.

I write about this here: https://jamaalglenn.substack.com/p/the-em-dash-isnt-an-ai-fingerprint?r=iwor&utm_medium=ios

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Eric Johnson's avatar

I've been reading Kafka's Trial and contemplating guilt. I heard another writer say Kafka didn't consider himself a "Writer." Guess he'd be just fine with AI.

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