You can blame me for all those em dashes in AI text

As an author, I love the device - a lovely little diversion from the main idea - but I never meant for it to go viral

- 

ABHISHEK CHINNAPPA Getty Images

THE REAL HUMAN authors of real books mostly didn't envision the foibles of AI chatbots.

NOW THAT I know how fond chatbots are of the em dash — the thing I just used to convey a thought that intruded on but is connected to the main sentence — I have a confession to make.

It’s in part my fault, apparently. Watch out for the semicolon, too; I sprinkle them like salt.

I'm one of those authors whose books AI ate for lunch a few years back, making us unwitting and unwilling contributors to the chatbot writing style, if you want to call it that. At some point I might get a check to pay me for a dozen years’ work on the three books it stole, but really, there’s no way to compensate for the fallout. AI seems to think — no, it can’t think, only shuffle what real people thought — that a machine can write as well as a person can. In the process of trying, it’s compromised the very tools we use.

I taught at Columbia Journalism School for 10 years, and was surprised to learn from a second-semester student that a first-semester professor had forbidden the use of the semicolon. It was sloppy, he said. Evidence of an indecisive mind. A better writer would find a more definitive way to punctuate the space between two thoughts.

He was tenured. I was an adjunct and surprised to find myself in the classroom at all, so I did what any decent writer does and succumbed to self-doubt. I write by ear — I worshipped another adjunct who insisted that all writing was musical — only to find that someone higher up the academic ladder believed I'd been doing it wrong, forever.