Do we need a term (probably German) for the anxiety that one's work might look like it was generated by machines?
Replies:
26
@JulianOliver Slopschmerz, causing a lot of Kummerspeck.
@jpoesen The moment I read your reply I found myself saying "damn I miss German".
@JulianOliver "Wurde nicht von einem stochastischen Papagei verfasst"
@themadhatter True! We don't hear much about the parrot anymore. We should bring it back -- a useful metaphor.
@JulianOliver this one is not bad either:
@JulianOliver AI imposter syndrome
I heard from someone near me today that to make your work appear less like it was machine-generated the emerging rule is that you should not use the 'em dash', nor write in paragraphs, rather one text block.
I have prior heard another say that text summaries at the end of an article are seen as indication of genAI use, as is text free of typos.
Has anyone heard of other references to behaviour-change born of such anxiety?
@JulianOliver I have seen typos recently that I wondered about. It wouldn't surprise me if humans added more humanity as a signal of authenticity.
I wonder if something like "shoe on head" video chat authentication will also come back out of necessity.
@JulianOliver This is a great listen, specifically about the much-maligned em dash and the em dash backlash: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/658-the-em-dash/
@scott Thanks! I will listen to it today.
This article shared by @slackline has some strongly-related fight in it https://www.theringer.com/2025/08/20/pop-culture/em-dash-use-ai-artificial-intelligence-chatgpt-google-gemini
@JulianOliver
> always used the em dash
Yeah – crowds blame humans for using what the #siliconiac had stolen.
@JulianOliver Maybe. But making your writing worse (or even different) because AI does something seems foolish to me.
Of course, em-dashes can be misused or overused, as can almost anything else. But they are not intrinsically bad and are sometimes essential. Many great writers use them frequently.
On the other hand, LLMs love emoji, and I wouldn’t discourage anyone from reducing their use.
@njr In agreement. I am opposed to any behavioural modification as a function of this would-be anxiety, just interested in it as a socio-technical symptom of our times.
@JulianOliver Sure. Agree with that.
@JulianOliver the construction that goes "it isn't only X, it's also Y" is something i've come to suspect as a mark of ai-generated stuff, in both english and romanian
in a more abstract sense, semanticly homogenous language is how i explain ai content to myself. people can (and sometimes do) draw paraleles between semantic domains based on subjective interpretarion. this is metonymy. a LLM can't replicate metonymy, only simile (metaphor) ("x is like y")
@catileptic What an insightful take, thank you. I had not considered this as a marker/indicator. This makes sense.
@JulianOliver if you'd like to read a bit about the difference between metonymy and metaphor (which are, at their core, concepts from within literature critique and theory), but applied to technologies (like search engines), i highly recommend Alfie Bown's book 'Dream Lovers', chapter 4 (The Match: Metaphor vs Metonymy). you don't need to read the rest of the chapters in order to get something from this one 😊 (but it's also a genuinely good book!)
@JulianOliver still related to em-dash but friend of mine told me that she'd rather rewrite sentences in a way she can drop em-dash at all.
@JulianOliver
I just finished a ~30-page white-paper, and afterwards ran it through Claude asking whether there were any constructions or anything that it would flag as AI-written. It caught a couple of things which were a little stilted... I re-wrote them in more direct language. So, yeah, I'd certainly rather nobody thought that my writing was AI-generated, and I'm willing to do a little extra work to try to make sure of that.
I just finished a ~30-page white-paper, and afterwards ran it through Claude asking whether there were any constructions or anything that it would flag as AI-written. It caught a couple of things which were a little stilted... I re-wrote them in more direct language. So, yeah, I'd certainly rather nobody thought that my writing was AI-generated, and I'm willing to do a little extra work to try to make sure of that.
@woody @JulianOliver So to avoid coming off as AI generated, you put your writing through a chatbot?
@jairajdevadiga @woody Admittedly I also find the strategy perplexing.
Bill is your concern that readers might put your text through an 'AI detection' tool and deem it machine made, or that a human might read it and deem it so?
Both?
If more the latter, might not soliciting feedback from people be a more fruitful approach?
If the former, I worry Claude would be so poisoned with bias you may risk giving a genAI stink to the text where it otherwise may have none.
@JulianOliver Do you mean "Künstlicheintellgenzerzeugungsangst"?
@nico That could definitely be a candidate! Danke sehr.
Sieht-hoffentlich-nicht-wie-KI-erzeugt-aus
