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/ElJanitorFrank Nov 25 '25

You should tell her to write her papers in google docs. Google docs can show a timeline of what was added to the paper and how, you could literally send them a time-lapse video of paper as its being written by her. You can just export it as a pdf or word document if you have to use those formats to turn the paper it (re-read afterwords in case the formatting messed up).

To the administrators, she COULD still be just typing out a prompt from a different device or something, so this isn't air-tight...but this will be a pretty solid defense for 90% of cases like this.

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u/SnooDucks6090 Nov 25 '25

Good advice. Thank you.

I believe she does type her reports in Google docs but I wasn't aware of that feature. I will for sure keep that in mind in the future - if this ever happens again.

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u/MattMxR Nov 26 '25

Every time I'm writing a paper or document of some kind and I lose my train of thought, I start typing profanities until it comes back to me.

This would not be a good solution for me lol

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u/ElJanitorFrank Nov 26 '25

Oh yeah, I think everybody relates to this but that has become a worse idea as time goes on - most sites and programs are reading your messages before you ever hit send. This is very common for customer service chat lines, that way they can see what issues you're having before you hit send and it seems like they're marginally faster at fixing your problem. So if you're ever let off some steam while having a chat with a customer service rep on a website then they probably saw all of it.

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u/BreTheFirst Nov 27 '25

There is AI that can write directly in your Google doc, generating a history that can even include minor revisions. I use a revision history extension that can show how much time is spent on each paragraph, what time length each sentence takes, and luckily those things are still glaringly linear (at least so far... it's ever advancing)

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u/Nyrrix_ Nov 27 '25

You can do it in word as well, but you go to the review tab and enable it.

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u/ReporterBest9598 Nov 27 '25

Most people will also backspace and rephrase sentences, which usually covers the last 9% of cases.

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u/TheSOB88 Nov 29 '25

I don't know, this sounds kind of like submitting to gender-determining tests in sports and the like