I’m not one to use a lot of em dashes, but I read plenty of great blogs by people who do (I guess they’re good at English?). I can only imagine how annoying that must be for them.
Nowadays, I find myself avoiding em dashes because I’m afraid that my writing will be flagged as AI-generated and dismissed as slop. I feel like I have to “dumb down” aspects of writing to convince readers that the words they are skimming were, in fact, written by a human.
What Michael describes here is the real challenge: do we lower the bar when we write with LLMs? For me, since English isn’t my first language, I feel like it improves my writing. But for Michael, I guess it doesn’t.
I’m curious (and more than a bit worried) that the writing that is being produced these days is being shaped by LLMs, even if an LLM has never touched a particular piece of prose.