From the Wired story More Typos, Fewer Em Dashes: Writers Are Creating an Anti-AI ‘Literary Counterculture’:

Across journalism, criticism, creative writing, and especially among compulsive LinkedIn posters, writers are converging on a set of choices that implicitly resist the trappings of AI-generated prose.

The style mostly takes shape through negation, often of the obvious AI tells, like lists of three, passive voice, not x but y, and em dashes. But it also prizes idiosyncrasy as its overriding principle, tapping into specific first-person anecdotes and eccentric similes that demonstrate the necessary drudgery of writing.

Every time I hear about people changing themselves to appease the new AI paradigm, I think of Michael Bolton’s response in Office Space when asked why he didn’t change his name to avoid being confused for the singer:

I don’t even think these writers are wrong for doing this. Three cheers for linguistic innovation! (An exception: pretentiously writing all in lowercase like Sam Altman, of all people.) I just resent being backed into it by LLMs that hoover up real people’s writing—without compensation or copyright considerations, mind you—and regurgitate it back to us non-robots well enough to make us think we’re now stealing from it.

Oops, I used em dashes. Am I a chatbot??