Em Dashes as a Crime: How AI Detectors Are Destroying Writing Trust
Altruistic_Virus8460 · reddit · 2026-07-30
A newsletter writer on Reddit expressed frustration over their human-written posts constantly being accused of being AI-generated. Because models frequently use em dashes and bullet points, some companies even banned employees from using them, forcing writers to deliberately make their work messier to prove human authorship.
The author pointed out that AI writes this way because it was trained on human data, yet flawed AI detectors—even flagging the US Constitution as AI—dictate these norms. They warned that this technology is breaking the very mechanisms society uses to decide what is real, fundamentally damaging digital trust.
More from AGI Musings
- First-ever paper on multi-agent swarm safety lands NeurIPS spotlight — LauraRuis · 2026-10-16
- Yoav Artzi on peer review: paper flooding still pays off as review system strains under load — yoavartzi · 2026-10-16
- Letta founder: work in fields defined by problems, not methods — lateinteraction · 2026-10-16
- Why pure mathematicians will soon flood into AI x-risk debates — Dr_Atoosa · 2026-10-16
- RSI began when model outputs augmented next-gen training data, agents just escalated it — akbirthko · 2026-10-16
- Luiza Jarovsky: with AI making careers unpredictable, 'do what you love' is the best advice left — LuizaJarovsky · 2026-10-16