One of my biggest struggles as a writer over the years has been figuring out how to handle the cavalcade of “asides” that show up in my writing. My rough drafts are a dizzying landscape of ideas so haphazard, it would be like the worst, ADHD-fueled, Seth MacFarlane nightmare of a storyline that consists of a main character saying one thing, followed by a complex web of nested pop culture references that continued, Inception-style, all the way to the end.
It’s bad.
To handle this, I would almost always use parentheses (like this, but with multiple ideas and paragraphs therein (which is a great way to confuse people (but can also be fun because it FEELS vaguely math-y (even though it isn’t because no numbers are involved (which is a great way to do math, if you ask me (at least until you’re trying to engineer something like a bridge or an airplane, because all these words and no numbers is how you end up killing people (and that’s bad (usually))))).
To handle this – and cut down on parenthesis inception – I landed on the em-dash. I had avoided it for years, because it felt strange (and also: I didn’t really understand it all that well (my elementary school teachers did a poor.job teaching me that (they are all dead now, so I can say that without angering them (probably))).
I settled into it, I figured it out, and my writing got better.
“This is what growth is!” I told myself. I was happy.
Then ChatGPT happened. Now, all those people who WANTED to be grammar Nazis (but never had the balls to do it (because they are cowards (stupid cowards (stupid, lazy, selfish, cowards!)!)) came out in force to let everyone know that any instance of em-dashes AUTOMAGICALLY means you used Chatty Geepts, Cope Pilot, Clawed, or some other AI to generate your post.
How dare you!
Yes. I generated my LinkedOn, FaseBok, or InstantGram post – which got three whole likes (and a retwit from someone in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia!) – with [enter your AI], and will now use my newfound glory to take over the world!
Things are going to start happening to me, now! (*cue evil laughter*).
Here’s the kicker (<— a phrase of which our good friend, Chatty Geepts is quite fond).
I don’t use AI to generate content. Ask anyone I write with. Ask my bosses at my various jobs over the years who have suffered through my weekly status updates (one of them said “You don’t write updates. You write Testaments).
I LIKE to write. Why would I give that up?
But also: I use AI to evaluate some of what I write. It gives me good feedback, helps me see my blind spots, and in a pinch, it can help me spell words like “pulchritudinous” AND find ways to work it into a post! That works for me.
I’m not judge-y. If someone out there can find a way to make their ideas make sense by prompting AI, so much the better. It’s just a faster and more efficient way for all the Stephen King clones or Stack Overflow Engineers that had already been flooding the market for decades to keep on doing what they’re doing.
If you’re not using AI to help your job in SOME way, you’re going to be the guy in waist-high pants and thick glasses, screaming at the neighborhood kids to get off your lawn, and that’s going to happen fast.
AI is innovative, but true, revolutionary innovation still exists solely in the human realm. It might evolve one day, but if we ever DO get to a point where the robots are more creative than us—hell, that sounds like a party to me.