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Every other post on my feed(s) lately is "how to spot AI writing," and they all list the same tells of em dashes, inversions like "it's not x, it's y," specific phrasing, god forbid a girl uses the word quiet. And, truly, I get it; nobody wants to support people gaming the system with generated slop or passing off something a machine wrote as their own craft. But I think this witch-hunt is actively corroding the writing community, and the general public along with it. Exhibit A: My friends who haven't cracked a novel since sophomore year English and whose entire written output is Slack messages and birthday captions are now telling me, a writer who grew up getting her prose torn apart at the dinner table by a copywriter and a screenwriter, that I need to drop em dashes from my work because it "sounds like AI." Like, that's where we're at.

And now, I've started catching myself going through drafts I wrote with my own hands and brain, scanning for anything that might get flagged by the mob. It's like I'm changing things not because the revision is better, but because I'm afraid it'll get flagged as generated content by some stranger on the internet who read one infographic about AI tells, which is a bit terrifying when you think about it. My last sentence literally used an inversion structure, and my brain immediately went, 'change it, they won't like that.'

Recently, I've had to stop and go, wait, I'm now making my writing worse on purpose. I'm abandoning my own voice, and frankly flattening the hell out of it, because I'm scared of an accusation on something I know I wrote myself. And in my opinion, that type of mentality is precisely how we lose good, if not great, aspiring authors and poets.

Again, I want to be crystal clear in saying I'm not writing this in hopes of making a case for AI in creative writing/art. But it feels like this is turning into another paper straw 'save the turtles' situation, where we shove all the responsibility onto individuals, especially ones who aren't famous or making money from their work, and tell them to police every sentence instead of just writing. Meanwhile, we could be building community and letting the actual slop reveal itself and fall to the wayside the way bad writing always has.

I guess my point is, if every human writer starts contorting their voice to dodge the same list of "AI tells," we all end up sounding the same anyway, which is the exact thing we were trying to avoid. (for reference, I wanted to end that last sentence with a rhetorical question, but I figured that's probably on the list too. And now I'm being snarky, which means it's time to wrap this up).

I don't know, maybe this is more of a rant than a question, but either way, curious if others are feeling the same way/how you're navigating.

It all reads like fantasy, until you look up from the page and realize we’re at war with Iran now, and the women who wanted to escape into their book boyfriend’s arms instead of engaging with discourse have been reading about a rebellion led by a love interest who is, funny enough, just the military establishment in a younger, hotter body on the supposedly right side of history. Maas and Yarros are telling different stories on the surface, but the curriculum is the same: The illusion is revolution, while the outcome is inheritance. 

And when you strip away the cloaks and dragons, the only thing getting thoroughly, repeatedly, and enthusiastically fucked in any of these stories is your worldview.

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(P.S this is an excerpt from a longer essay where i follow this thread through music, movies, and pop culture. all of which i love, by the way -- just also have thoughts...don't send me to book jail.)