Contributor: You can blame me for all those em dashes in AI-generated text

Now that I know how much chatbots love the em dash — the thing I just used to convey a thought that intrudes but is related to the main sentence — I have a confession to make.

It’s partly my fault, apparently. Also pay attention to the semicolon; I sprinkle them like salt.

I’m one of those authors whose books AI ate for lunch a few years ago, making us unwitting and unwitting contributors to the chatbot writing style, if you want to call it that. At some point, I might get a check to pay me for a dozen years of work on the three stolen books, but in reality, there’s no way to offset the fallout. The AI ​​seems to think – no, it can’t think, it just mixes together what real people thought – that a machine can write as well as a person. In trying, it compromised the very tools we use.

I taught at the Columbia Journalism School for 10 years and was surprised to learn from a second-semester student that a first-semester professor had banned the use of the semicolon. It was botched, he said. Evidence of an indecisive mind. A better writer would find a more definitive way to punctuate the space between two thoughts.

He was tenured. I was an adjunct and was surprised to find myself in class, so I did what any decent writer does and succumbed to doubt. I write by ear – I loved another assistant who insisted that all writing was musical – only to discover that someone higher up the academic ladder thought I had it wrong all along.

Then I did the other thing every decent writer does: I defended myself. Banning the semicolon seemed pretty intransigent, I said. I joked about the possibility that our conflicting attitudes were based on gender. I softened my outrage by referencing my woo-woo West Coast roots: everything is connected to everything, hence the semicolon, even though my childhood was spent in the decent, regimented Midwest.

I told my students that they should try what seemed good to them as long as they didn’t sacrifice clarity. There are many melodies.

But back to the hyphens. I just finished writing a book that is as full of it as the other books I’ve written in over 40 years, so I don’t know what to do next, because it seems my writing style now invites suspicion. I could go through 63,000 words and change the em dashes to I don’t know what. Periods. Commas, which lose the half-step hesitation that a semicolon offers – and can join two independent clauses together. Or colons, which are too categorical. Or I could post a disclaimer on the title page: no AI programs were used in the creation of this book.

Of course, this puts me at greater risk. “The lady protests too much”: some readers will assume that I actually collaborated with a machine.

Maybe we need a certification bureau whose logo sits right above the publisher’s logo on the spine of a book, so that anyone who still buys books can tell at a glance whether a human being has consumed too much coffee and developed a turtleneck in the service of storytelling. Even as I write, paranoia hits me on the shoulder. Who certifies the certifiers to ensure they don’t let ChatGPT do the analysis?

By the way, the Copilot feature on Word, which I can’t turn off no matter what I try, just kicked in to highlight “at a glance”. Readers would be better served, I am told, if I used “briefly” or “immediately,” neither of which is exactly what I meant.

A long time ago, I worked with a magazine editor who seemed to really enjoy his job, especially choosing exactly the right word. We would go through the almost final version, paragraph by paragraph, to address passages or even single words that he felt weren’t quite right. I would suggest a change or two, then give in to insecurity, because it was early in the game for me and I had a small case of imposter syndrome. Obviously he had the right word in mind, and whatever it was, I was fine with it.

His answer was always the same. It’s your play, he said, and I know you can make it. He would repeat the point he thought I was trying to make, and I would suggest a few more options until I found the right one.

I’ve been grateful to him ever since, although I now hold him partly responsible for my desire to use hyphens and semicolons.

When I found out about the ban on semicolons from my colleague at Columbia, I checked out a few books by my favorite authors and – lo and behold – I found hyphens and semicolons galore and felt redeemed. Yes, I use them too often, and yes, I sometimes reread the punctuation to see if any of them are superfluous. I left them all in this essay on purpose, so commenters can complain about how many users I use or accuse me of being a front for ChatGPT.

I’m not saying everyone should write without the help of AI. I’ve heard of job seekers using AI to defeat AI candidate screening systems and I’m all for it, but these are survival tactics, not self-expression. I say we must value the human voice as we value any other natural resource, and be wary of pretenders. But the dashes don’t prove that the software wrote anything. Affectless language, the absence of anything resembling a writer’s idiosyncratic style, is a sure sign that no one is home. Writing as boring as your most annoying relative was probably written by a chatbot that can’t see, hear, taste, smell, touch, or smell. Accept it and we will only be poorer for it.

Karen Stabiner is the author, most recently, of “Generation Chef: Risking It All for a New American Dream.”