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 parrot (Bender et al. 2021)?

References

Bender, Emily M., Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Shmargaret Shmitchell. 2021. ‘On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?’ Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, 610–23. https://doi.org/10.1145/3442188.3445922.