Dashed — Writing Like a Machine

I like dashes of all kinds: the hyphen, the syllable-breaking dash, the dialogue dash. I like diacritics, I like commas. Whenever I can, I use non-breaking spaces between words that belong together. I’ve been using them for decades, on my own, as consistently as I can.

But lately, using these writing “delicacies” is seen as a sure sign the text was written by GPT. What should I do? Write worse? Or investigate whether I, too, might be a stochastic parrot¹?

References

1.

Bender, E. M., Gebru, T., McMillan-Major, A. & Shmitchell, S. On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? in Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency 610–623 (ACM, 2021) doi:10.1145/3442188.3445922.