em dash tragedy

welcome to introspection ft. harsehaj! ⭐️ i’m harsehaj, a 19 y/o always up to something in social good x tech.

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onto today’s topic: em dash tragedy 😞 

some of you may have noticed that i love using em dashes in my writing. they’re such a versatile form of punctuation and are also less formal, which is exactly what my style is.

it seems like chatgpt shares my love for em dashes as well, hence why they’re become a key indicator for ai-generated content. it’s pretty sad that a lot of writers must now begin tweaking their favourite phrases and style of writing to shift away from that of chatgpt’s so they don’t get accused of copy-pasting gpt content. 🫣 

it’s probably a good idea to read up on some of gpt’s quirks when generating written content. it definitely overuses some phrases, but as you scroll deeper and deeper into that subreddit i linked, it feels like everything is on the red-list now.

even worse, professors are more concerned with spotting any instance of ai-generation and flagging it, rather than encouraging students to pull their answers from personal experiences and writing about those. unless you’ve created a vector database of your entire life’s memories, gpt can’t exactly write about your specific experiences.

an em dash doesn’t necessarily mean someone used chatgpt to write a blog post — the same goes for a lot of different phrases that have now been flagged as ai.

free the em dash. 😭 

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