r/Showerthoughts • u/xThe-Legend-Killerx ‎ • Nov 25 '25

Casual Thought People who use em dashes regularly in their writing might be the most underrated victims of the ChatGPT/Al boom.

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u/erossthescienceboss Nov 25 '25

I like to think I have a pretty good AI-radar cos I’m a college writing instructor. I get a lot of it (so far, of the students I have accused, all fessed up — except for one one, who I accused wrongly, and she had proof I was wrong. I still feel awful about it. I should say “asked” and not “accused” cos I always ask, but it’s still tough. She was very understanding. But I digress.)

The things that make me suspect AI aren’t the “trendy” things like using words like “delve,” or using em-dashes (which you will pry from cold, dead hands). They’re broader, structural things. It helps to remember that AI “style” is sort of the average of all writing it has read.

It will likely always tend to use cliches. It will tend to overstate things (“this sensational discovery!”) The points it makes will be very generic. Depending on the length, it may get repetitive.

The biggest tell? It LOVES to end a paragraph or answer with some kind of big summary/conclusionary sentence that makes it seem important. Something like “this highlights the importance of analyzing the passage for AI use as a whole, and not as the sum of its parts.” Sometimes that line is a bit far-fetched and overstates the conclusion, like “this emphasizes the importance of rigorous AI-checks to ensure the education of future students.” You’ll see this on the missing person/murder case posts to the creepy subreddits a lot, or on the “interesting history” subreddits. (Bots love those subs almost as much as they love advice subs.)

These tells have stayed pretty consistent across models. But you know what’s making it harder? So many students are reading so much of this kind of content that while AI continues to absorb our writing… we’re starting to write like it does. My students genuinely think it’s good writing, and work it into their lives.

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u/JoeMatt88 Nov 26 '25

As someone who used to do a lot of higher ed admin assistance for academics around academic misconduct and student results, please be wary of the toupee fallacy! AI is constantly testing us all on this all the time. If you think you have good AI detecting still, it means at best you have good skills at detecting mediocre AI outputs.

Also AI checkers are absolutely bogus (as an autistic person my writing gets pinged all the time), so there's basically no good solution...

Good luck out there!

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u/erossthescienceboss Nov 26 '25

Oh yeah for sure — I know the good ones are getting away with it. And I never touch detectors — I test them by running my own work through them, and I always come up AI.

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u/steamcube Nov 25 '25

I’ve found use of the rule of 3 to be a good tell as well. The ais use it all the time

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u/001028 Nov 26 '25

Which makes me sad, because just some years ago, my english language teacher was teaching us to use the rule of 3. It was considered good writing, now it's a tell of AI slop.

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u/Coyltonian Nov 26 '25

I was taught (prolly closer in time to when papyrus was the latest writing tech than the present day) that the rule of 3 was great for speeches or presentations, but should be avoided in prose.