Writer Witch Hunts Brought to You By AI
- Shanna Meaders
- Sep 26
- 2 min read
Updated: Sep 27
Writing with AI is bad, okay. If you’ve hung around me for any time at all you know I find it gross. Think with your brain. Write your own words. Do your own work. If you use AI to write your words, you’re stealing from me and countless others. Gross!
BUT. Let’s please all stop witch-hunting writers and calling them out for using AI based on em dashes, repeated sentence structures, being too precise, exclamation marks, semicolons, parentheses, white spaces, emojis, you fucking name it.
One LinkedIn lurker recently reminded us once again that the em dash equals AI. In case we’d forgotten in the 45 seconds since the last person posted about it.
A commenter retorted that a sure sign of AI is not the use of the em dash. The sure sign is the use of the em dash when parentheses are more appropriate.
Could be. It could also be a sign of a less experienced, less educated writer.
It’s not a sure sign. Neither are a sure sign. Come on.
Some writers are still finding their voice. Some new writers are going by the book at all costs. Some are told to stifle all tone in the name of big corporate. Choosing message over style can be the epitome of AI tells, and it’s often man-made.
AI doesn’t make up new ways to do things. AI learned from us! We taught it what to say, when to say it, and how to say it. Some of us, I may or may not be looking straight down into your soul, did it on purpose. Others did it unwillingly as AI flayed our work off the fleshy bodies of our portfolios.
You may think AI detectors can tell you what’s what, but think again. Authors have sacrificed pieces, written long before the invention of AI, that detectors flagged as AI. Others have fed family photographs to the same devil, and I bet you a nickel you can guess what. Yep, it flagged them as AI. Sheesh.
My point is, stop attacking. Stop sending people after people. The truth is if you don’t know, you don’t know. We’ve all got enough muck to tread through. We shouldn’t be shoving each other down in it. We should be lifting each other out of it.
Simple. Don’t use AI. Hire writers who don’t use AI. Put it in your contracts. Let’s not hiss “J’accuse” every time we see an em dash. And please stop waving everyone over to your corner of LinkedIn with your claim to the latest AI tell.
There are plenty of us out here fighting the good fight. Let's be good to each other.
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