If you write a decent sentence these days, people suspect you of being a machine. A focused, well-written paragraph is evidence of artificial intelligence, and using an em-dash may as well be a confession.
The deluge of AI produced writing has made us suspicious of prose itself. When people know that writing can be generated by a non-human, they can use that uncertainty to deny even authentic evidence. A thoughtful essay can be dismissed as AI generated. A personal story can be accused of being manufactured. An argument can be waved away because it sounds a little too polished, as if clarity were a crime scene and good grammar the getaway car.
We already live in a world where people read headlines
instead of articles and scan opinions for ammunition. Now we have another
convenient excuse not to engage with something we dislike: it can be dismissed
as artificial ... no need to answer the argument, just blame the algorithm and
move along. Marking something as "AI" becomes a convenient excuse for tossing it in a trash can for inconvenient ideas.
Personally, I’m less interested in whether a human or a
machine assembled a sentence than whether the sentence has something worth
saying. Who wrote it matters, certainly. But so do honesty, originality,
experience, and the willingness to say something that hasn’t been polished into
meaninglessness.
Me? I’ll keep writing. I’ll use the words I want to use and include the occasional em-dash. And I’ll try not to confuse polish with
wisdom or awkwardness with authenticity.
And if someone decides that my writing sounds too much like
AI, I guess I’ll have to live with that.
I spent years learning to write well. It would be a shame to
stop just because the machines have caught up with the grammar and punctuation.
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