Continue to Write Well — Never Mind the AI Detectors
May 23, 2026
Yes, there’s an em-dash in the title. Yes, I wrote that. By hand. No, I will not stop using em-dashes in my regular writing.
I’m starting to see threads on Reddit and other places where people are alleging the use of AI simply because someone dared to write well, or used appropriate punctuation & typography. And then others reply, saying they’ve started introducing errors in their writing intentionally, to ward off AI Detector bots that seem to think that all well-written text must be AI-authored because humans don’t write that way.
Reminds me of that old joke about a Japanese factory that received an order for widgets which said 3–4 out-of-spec widgets out of a 1000 would be OK, so they dutifully produced a batch with a note: “Our tooling was unable to manufacture the 3-4 broken pieces you asked for, so we had to craft them by hand; here they are.”
The AI is the plagiarizer, not you
AI writes like good writers, not the other way around. LLMs were trained on our hand-written, painstakingly-edited text, so the AI is the plagiarizer, not you. Don’t self-censor your own writing for fear of some half-assed AI Detector claiming you used AI to express your thoughts.
This is broken on so many levels. First, AI Detectors are made from the same probabilistic dust that AI Generators are made from. (And it’s probably a VC-funded startup trying to sell hook you onto a monthly subscription to some snake oil.) There’s really no way to tell with any amount of certainty whether some text was machine-generated or human-authored. (Insert spiderman meme here, with multiple spidermen pointing fingers at one another).
Second, bowing to these stochastic parrots only serves to reinforce the wrong stereotype that only an LLM can produce good prose. This is a false meme we need to fight back against, and the sooner the better.
Good Writing Matters; Good Typography Matters
I’ve been using proper typography in my writing for decades, and I’m not about to stop any time soon. Ever since TeX introduced me to em-dashes (—), en-dashes (–), proper left- (‘) and right-quotes (’), and my personal favorite, the interrobang (‽), I’ve been making sure to use the correct typographical entities in all my writing.
Not just in academic papers or formal blog posts; if I’ve sent you an email or chat in the last ~20 years, you can go back and confirm that I used right-quotes for apostrophes (like this: don’t, not don't), and proper left-double-quotes and right-double-quotes for quotations (like “hello”, not "hello"), not straight double-quotes. (Those are reserved for programming use cases.)
These are only a tiny bit harder to type than the simpler characters that show up on a single key on your keyboard. E.g. on macOS,
“isOption + [”isOption + Shift + [–isOption + -—isOption + Shift + -
It’s even easier on Android and iOS: just hold down the corresponding keyboard keys for longer than usual, and it’ll show you a pop-up with a palette of symbols.
TeX deserves credit for introducing me to proper typography, and for showing why it matters so much. TeX makes it automatic to the point where using proper typography is the well-lit path, and using bad/wrong typography takes additional effort. When you write three hyphens in LaTeX (—), it automatically produces an em-dash. Two hyphens (–) become an en-dash.
Aside: I admire Donald Knuth, the creator of TeX, as the ultimate yak shaver in Computer Science: he ended up creating TeX in ~1978 because he didn’t like the typography tools available at the time he wrote “The Art of Computer Programming”. So not only did we get a classic tome out of him, we also got a typesetting system that has survived the test of time for nearly 5 decades now.
Good typography matters. Even though your readers might not notice your attention to detail at every word, they can tell when something looks polished, and when something feels off. Typefaces matter, design matters. And writing well continues to matter.
The Actual Advice
The reason we’ve come to associate em-dashes and en-dashes with LLM-generated text is because LLMs tend to over-use them. An LLM will use an em-dash even where a comma would be more appropriate. It’s like a child who just learned a new word and wants to use it every chance they get.
Be the human writer who understands the nuances among the different kinds of hyphens/dashes.
Maintain your own voice & style, and feel free to use AI to correct typos and punctuation. But don’t let it think for you, or switch up the punctuation to use uncommon marks where they don’t belong.
Most importantly, don’t dumb down your own writing—both prose and typography—to avoid being flagged as an LLM.
