About a year and a half ago, I wrote about my kid’s experience with an AI checker tool that was pre-installed on a school-issued Chromebook. The assignment had been to write an essay about Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron—a story about a dystopian society that enforces “equality” by handicapping anyone who excels—and the AI detection tool flagged the essay as “18% AI written.” The culprit? Using the word “devoid.” When the word was swapped out for “without,” the score magically dropped to 0%.
The irony of being forced to dumb down an essay about a story warning against the forced suppression of excellence was not lost on me. Or on my kid, who spent a frustrating afternoon removing words and testing sentences one at a time, trying to figure out what invisible tripwire the algorithm had set. The lesson the kid absorbed was clear: write less creatively, use simpler vocabulary, and don’t sound too good, because sounding good is now suspicious.
At the time, I worried this was going to become a much bigger problem. That the fear of AI “cheating” would create a culture that actively punished good writing and pushed students toward mediocrity. I was hoping I’d be wrong about that.
Turns out … I was not wrong.
I’m accused of being AI on other sites simply because I construct complex sentences with regularity – and use emdashes.
That’s more a matter of 95% of people not even knowing how to type a ‘–’ with their standard keyboard layout.
I don’t get that, I’ve always used them, long before AI was a thing.
I’ve found that I actually seem to use more em-dashes since they became understood to be associated with AI — it’s a defiance thing. I mostly type on my phone, and to type an em dash, I just need to long press on the dash.
Word processors (like MS Word) have been doing it automatically since I was in school. Same with double spacing after a period.
Which is great for one application, but two spaces after each period would be hell to edit down to AP Style.
I mean, Ctrl+H and switching two spaces to one is easily doable, but that’s not where I want to start the editing process.
In my experience that is in fact more of a MS Word feature (and very inconsistent at it) than a general word processor feature. But maybe I’m underestimating the impact on “average texts” simply because my use of MS products is far below average.
I doubt the average student is using anything other than Word, unless they are using AI to begin with.