This week it’s come to my attention that people are starting to interpret use of m-dashes (or if you’re typing in pure text form, double dashes) as a sign that an AI wrote something.

I found out about this when I was having a conversation with someone on Discord, and in one of my replies to them, happened to use double dashes. They accused me of writing my answer with an AI.

And wow, that pissed me off.

Because look, y’all. If you’ve read me for more than five minutes, either my published prose or any blog post I’ve ever done, you probably know I loves me some m-dashes. I loves me some semi-colons, too. I sprinkle those bad boys all over my prose like sea salt on edamame. In fact, I love them a little too much. Which is why, any time I do a serious edit pass on prose I’ve written, I yank a bunch of my own m-dashes right back out again, and restructure a bunch of sentences so I use fewer of them. This is all in the name of letting the m-dashes remain maintain good dramatic impact. That’s what, at least in my writing, they’re for.

And at this point, I know for a fact that all five of my published novels have been eaten by at least one LLM, Meta’s. Probably all of them, though I don’t have direct confirmation of that. Along with hundreds of thousands of other fiction released by authors all over the world.

So when I hear about use of m-dashes being used as a marker to try to spot AI writing, all I can say is this:

LLMS ARE USING M-DASHES BECAUSE THEY STOLE THEM FROM US WRITERS, AND THEY’RE DOING IT BADLY.

And yes, I’m shouting. Because it pisses me off that first of all, my work, along with the work of countless other creatives, has been thrown into the LLM wood chipper. It pisses me off further–insult to injury–that punctuation tools that writers use to deliberate effect are now taken to just be a marker of LLM output.

Let me say it louder for the people in the back: deliberate effect. Like what I did in that last sentence.

Writers with a command of their language know how to use these punctuation tools. It’s all part of learning that command of language, just as anyone learning any skill new to them masters all the tools relevant to that skill. LLMs are not conscious entities. They’re not artisans. They’re not trying to hone use of specific tools in order to improve their own skill at a form of art. They’re just spewing out word salad in whatever order their algorithms are insisting are statistically likely to happen next.

They’re fucking wood chippers. And you know what you get out of a wood chipper? Wood chips. And there is a world of difference between a pile of wood chips and a living, growing oak tree. The tree takes time to nurture, as does any form of human art. Whereas getting a pile of wood chips just takes however long is required to feed that oak log into the chipper. No, I don’t know how long that takes. But I guarantee you it takes less time than it took for the tree to grow to the point of someone deciding to chop it down.

And so now, pointing at m-dashes (or any other punctuation, or any other writing tool, really) as an indicator of “an AI must have written it” is, for my money, equivalent to pointing at the wood chips and proclaiming them the exact same thing as the tree.

Which is an insult to each and every writer whose work was thrown into LLMs to create the slurry now flooding the Internet.

Please don’t do that to us, people. We’re despairing enough as it is that our work has been hijacked for this. It does not help to see not only our artistic works in general, but even the very building blocks of that art, now getting dismissed as “oh, an AI must have done it.”

Please do better.