LLemdashes

May 20, 2026

LLemdashes

It was only a matter of time before I caught a stray — you know, considering.

I know this is gonna sound a little navel-gazesque from the jump, but yesterday I had something I’d written dismissed as the “work” of an LLM. According to their comment, the reader saw a bunch of emdashes up-front and bailed on the rest of the article. If you can believe it, this was the first such comment I’ve gotten, despite the hundreds of thousands of words — and almost as many emdashes, case in point — that I’ve written over the past few years. I won’t link to it here because I wouldn’t want anyone piling onto a thread on an unrelated post, and because I don’t really fault the person for saying it; leave 'em be.

For one thing, I do use too many emdashes. Listen, I read a bunch of Kerouac a long time ago. I don’t apologize for the emdashes; I do apologize for my reading habits back when I was twenty-mumble years old, but that’s only semi-related.

Mostly though, I don’t fault them for the impulse that drives that kind of comment. Hell, I agree with it: generated text, assembled by nobody and increasingly for nobody, should be dismissed. Even leaving aside the lack of craft, dubious accuracy, and insultingly cloying and sycophantic tones: why should anyone care about reading something nobody cared enough to write? If a publication is willing to pad itself out with the prose equivalent of Circus Peanuts — to take you, the reader, for an easy mark — I agree that you should hold them in lower esteem, if not outright scorn. If I thought I was being tricked into eating a meal stretched with sawdust, I’d be left feeling angry and dismissive of the meal, chef, and restaurant too. I’ve been there — reading-wise, I mean, not eating-wise. I know that “hah, gotcha; they’ll never put one over on me” feeling. It feels ~good to catch on to the fact that you’re being tricked, the way it feels ~good to prod at an aching tooth. It could be that I’ve been wrong about it before too — I bet I have been, but I’ll never know. I can’t know, by design.

The only “advancement” in generative AI, since its inception, has been in slowly getting better at fooling us into thinking its output isn’t generative AI. It is software designed to put strings in the most statistically likely order that an average human would. It is meant to trick us, at its core; an engine with “passable sentence” as its sole ideal output. Why else would it make us so angry? Why else would so many of us want to lash out at the sight of it, whether real or imagined? Why else would we “boo” these hollow-eyed, out-of-touch ghouls that try to advertise their “AI” investments during commencement speeches? Hell yeah; good. Send a message — call it out for what it is, and dismiss it loudly and in no uncertain terms.

Which is how my work got dismissed. It stung — it stings, sure — I mean, c’mon, same team — but I get it. I really do. I mean, look at the start of this paragraph, which I’m now refusing to go back and edit for illustrative purposes. Hell, I’m starting to suspect me a little. Emdashes have come to represent the big glowing weak point on the boss monster that threatens to consume the livelihood of so many of us; something recognizable, from a hundred paces, as a sign that something is dismissable. Of course we’re gonna attack it on sight. I also want to take a swipe at the grey goo threatening to smother both the web that I’ve worked so hard to build and the career I’ve been so fortunate to have.

But my second reaction, after the flash of “the robots can have my emdashes when they pry them from my cold, dead hands” anger and just a whisper of “what’s the point of even writing” was that I’m privileged in that I can shrug this off. I am established — I’m here, and you’re reading this now, for some wild reason. I’m “a long time out from reading Kerouac,” as we emdashers of a certain age call it — forty-mumble years old, nearly half of which was spent here, doing this. I’ve done a lot of writing over a lot of years, and I’ve been fortunate enough to get it in front of a lot of people. I’m not the thing that gets us out of this mess. I can’t be.

These tools, to the extent they can or should ever be personified, want rid of me pretty bad — but not half as badly as they want to prevent another one of me from ever happening again. The explicit goal of generative AI is to fill the role of “junior-level” everything the way insulating spray-foam in a car’s exhaust pipe might help prevent excessive engine noise. They exist to keep entry-level workers pruned all the way back to the roots, in the interest of keeping wages low, employment tenuous, staff nervous, and the unfathomably rich insulated from the potential financial repercussions of destroying countless lives. If you can never advance beyond a “press the button, generate the thing,” you’re as replaceable as the next person — if there’s nothing beyond entry-level experience, they’ll never...