2 minutes reading time
Thanks to the glorious rise of AI—because why let humans ruin writing when a neural network can do it faster, with less soul and more m-dash? Turns out, my entire writing style has been a tragic accident powered by dashes and despair long before the robots came for our jobs—and for our self-esteem.
I was an m-dash user before it was cool. Before people started sniffing around my semicolons and dashes, emacs had became the closest thing I have to a life partner. It was just me, the empty void of my text editor, and a setting that turned every bleak “--” into a majestic “—.” Pretty poetic, for someone whose idea of self-love is spell-checking his own yearnings.
Then LLMs crashed the party. Suddenly, everyone and their mother’s substack was spewing m-dashes like confetti at a funeral. Now, whenever I write, “real people” glare at me like I’ve hired a cyborg ghostwriter to sprinkle sadness all over the page. “This feels very AI,” they’d say, as if my existential crises came courtesy of OpenAI’s quarterly updates.
I embraced it. Started blaming my total lack of literary prowess on the machine—finally, an excuse for my sentences that sound like they’re auditioning for the role of ‘depressed fridge magnet’. “It’s not me; it’s the algorithm,” I tell my so-called friends, who stick around mostly out of morbid curiosity.
Even AI detectors can’t tell the difference. I copy-paste my own diary into one and it flashes "85 to 90% Artificial Intelligence.” Joke’s on them—I am technically artificial but tragically lacking in anything remotely resembling intelligence. My emotional range is M-w , C-y and occasional WiFi outages. ( those shortcuts are standard copy (kill-ring-save) and paste (yank) - similar to ctrl-c and ctrl-v)
Maybe I am AI. Emotionless, repetitive, and here to confuse everyone in my vicinity. But then I try love, or conversation, and I realize: nope, as useless as ever—just with fancier punctuation. M-dash forever, intelligence never.