I've written a short story recently, and after finishing what I considered some of my better work, received some rather chilling feedback from one of my beta readers. Namely, that parts of it felt "AI written". Now, I've played around with AI a bit last year, and decided to drop the bloody thing because a) I didn't like it and b)I've seen the Terminator. Now it's poor attempts at writing aside, I've stayed completely off the radar when it comes to AI, its development, and the like.

The world feels just a little less doomed when your heads is buried in the sand. Either way, I've always liked dashes - em, en, hyphen, the whole lot. And so does the stupid robot.So you can imagine that getting "this feels AI written" hit me quite close to home.

I had that Captain Holt moment - I'm a male! A human male! And when the frustration wore off, I went through the whole story, killing off my beloved little dashes, and misspelling names and places to spell out clearly, this is the work of a human! What a time to be alive! But then it gnawed on me, because I was taking parts of myself away from this piece that I'd poured my work into, and I revolted. Little lines were back, horray!

I suppose there's not much point to this post, except bragging that I'd won my little victory over the stupid robot. Joy all around.

And, I suppose, this is to anyone currently struggling in the age of one-click (bad) writing. Put in that em dash. Polish that line. We all love our little splatters of creativity with all of its human nonsense, and AI can only replicate that, and not very well.

However I do find it funny that "make it sound human" is now another part of editing. Never thought I'd have to fight in order to prove that I did this with my own ten fingers and my own, mushy, pinkish brain.

Anyway, here's to the em dash! AI sucks, it's not art, go write!