By Siya Gauri Singh
The em dash (—) has officially been blacklisted from writing. Well, not officially, but pretty evidently. After all, the em dash, also known as the long dash, has become the trademark sign of AI use.
In fact, it has become such a ubiquitous symbol of AI that even if a human uses the em dash all by themselves, people still think AI has been used. Frankly, I would too. After all, how many humans actually used an em dash before AI?
Turns out, a fair amount of people, and they have a real problem with this new bias against em dashes.
A few weeks ago, I was at an event where multiple Gen Xers lamented over how they cannot use em dashes anymore because they don’t want to give the impression that AI is being used. Honestly, I don’t blame them. This bias has become so ingrained in me that even if I do generate an AI response, I personally go and remove all of the em dashes to prevent the impression that I have used AI. But why don’t we want others to think we use AI to respond, especially if we have?
Weirdly, I’m not too sure myself. Perhaps it is the fear of being seen as inauthentic, or a fear of the other person thinking they are not important enough for me to use actual words emerging straight from my mind to respond to them. But also, I don’t want someone else to think that I believe AI can better express my thoughts in words than I could. And that is scary.
As many of us rely more on AI to express our thoughts into words, we are feeding a belief that AI’s use of language and expression is better than ours. Sure, it produces grammatically sound sentences every single time, and adds in intelligent sounding vocabulary for good measure, but is it really expressing my thoughts better than I can? In some cases, perhaps it is. After all, if I want something written in concise words, AI is the way to go. I can give it what I wrote and in a matter of seconds it will cut down, tear apart and redesign the language I wrote to fit the word limit. And while I will look at the words proudly thinking it’s under the word limit, can I even take ownership of the words anymore? As beautiful as they sound, are they really my words anymore?
It is difficult to navigate this. While I can remove a few em dashes from here and there to make the text look like it’s human-written, at the end of the day I know that they are not my words. But somehow I still feel better and smarter and more capable using AI to express myself. I guess my issue with this is that while AI is improving to sound more like humans, we are also evolving to sound more like AI because of a belief that AI can somehow express my thoughts better than I can. And if we all start using AI to communicate with each other, eventually are we even communicating with each other? Because while the thought may be mine, the words aren’t. And if the words aren’t mine, how can I truly mean what I am saying?
