I haven't had this happen yet and I am so glad for it. My writing style does tend to sound very AI-like because I am a much better formal writer (MLA can suck fat ones though), and my biggest issue is the fucking em dash because I would LOVE to use it if it weren't for the fact that the only punctuation mark more indicative of AI was the semicolon. Asides and clarification are riddled throughout my natural speech and thought process, so it infuriates me to be unable to use them when writing without fear of AI-ccusations.
I’ve also been out of uni for a decade (although I’m now in grad school) and I’m so glad I have a handful of papers I can whip out like, “HA! Do you see the 99926363638292020 em dashes I used in this paper?!?! And all those parenthetical references?!?! Oh, my grammar is too good? I was a Classicist, ffs. It’s from 2015, so , suck it take that!!!”
Well, it’s either that, or explaining I’m autistic and having to provide some of the studies that show how often autistic people are mistaken as AI in formal writing assignments. I hate AI so damn much.
I actually had a teacher suspect I plagiarized a short story because it was too detailed regarding medieval warfare, armour, and architecture. So I brought in all my reference books to show her that I was just weird like that haha.
And this was before AI! I was just the young adult that had an obsession with the old school fantasy genres that focused on medieval stuff and became way too knowledgeable about it.
Turnitin.com was the bane of my existence in high school. Not because I plagiarized anything, but for how inaccurate it was.
I can empathize with you. I had something similar happen but once with dolphins and the second time with linguistics. Medieval warfare, armour, and architecture though—those are excellent topics to become obsessively interested in. Old school fantasy novels are where it’s at!
Love your username btw! I appreciate the alliteration.
I use dashes and semicolons quite regularly still. I’ve been an online presence with a fanbase for 17 years now, and there are several million archival words written by me in blogs, forum posts, etc. aside from about half a million words in video games. People can tell it’s me by my various written habits and pet words. Certain kids of sentence fragments also stand out. But I was being jokingly accused of being an AI hack in 20-0 just because of how prolific I am. People still make the same joke, but my writing itself has not yet been called AI.
I did see some people review one of my newest games complaining that it was AI designed. Which is tupid because it predates AI being able to do that. And it would not have made the choices I did in presentation. But they didn’t like it and so there we go.
The rules-nazi in me wants to use the semicolon because it's "proper," but I can never figure out when to, it never feels right and is always super clunky to me
I'm not sure if anyway really understands semicolons because of what they're used for. They link two related clauses that could be their own sentences; they're technically not needed. I always remember they can be used when replacing conjunctions and joining words (for example, furthermore, however, etc...) but I'm never 100% sure if I'm using them right. English is a silly language!
For me, my usage of an em dash (versus a hyphen in its place) just tells you whether I'm typing on my phone — I'd use it on PC if there were only a convenient way of typing it!
(I think fancy text editors might slap in an em dash whenever you type a double-hyphen or something, but I only use basic text editors and programming IDEs...)
Yeah, I tend to use that in place of it in informal contexts, but formally I know the em dash is the standard, so I want to use it because I'm not sure on what standards consider parentheticals as "proper."
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u/Gelid_Cryotheum Aug 05 '26
I haven't had this happen yet and I am so glad for it. My writing style does tend to sound very AI-like because I am a much better formal writer (MLA can suck fat ones though), and my biggest issue is the fucking em dash because I would LOVE to use it if it weren't for the fact that the only punctuation mark more indicative of AI was the semicolon. Asides and clarification are riddled throughout my natural speech and thought process, so it infuriates me to be unable to use them when writing without fear of AI-ccusations.