“Do I Sound Like AI?”

I used to put great pains into my emdashes. They were (probs still are) a real mf in Word. You have to do this thing where you put a word after a regular hyphen - to make that hyphen grow, like a little catepillar that could, into the fully formatted/extended emdash butterfly that you see flapping it's damn wings everywhere now. This metamorphosis would regularly fuck up, of course, because Microsoft, so you'd have to backtrack to the still cocooned hyphen, drop an "a" in there after it once again, and then immediately hit spacebar like some word surgeon teasing the baby's head out. Then you delete the umblical "a". Then you silently die a little inside at this whole fucking thing, and move on to the next sentence with maybe half your thoughts still intact.

It was a whole damn ritual. Just for one lousy emdash. This may have all just been me and my personal struggle with tech, but I'm sharing it because it's almost impossible to think of now since the punctuation became a landmine.

That ritual is forbidden to all but the bravest of writers, those willing to risk the pyre for their punctuation's provenance, in a town overflowing with casual plagiarists and paranoiacs, each of us deep in a crisis of reality. The emdash is peak AI-ese and thus, a prime signal for where to point the pitchforks.

This AI-ese strikes me as a new kind of transatlanticism, or a new BBC voice. A kind of signifier, a performative faux-authority. More fluent than it deserves, more confident than we should allow. But so seductive. Dangerously so.

Someone checked ecology papers pre/post GPT and found a noticeable surge in emdash use. Someone else used to scrape the internet to track the trends of specific words — this would be useful right now — but the project was switched off because the flood of AI-speak made the signal impossible to measure. We should probably restart something like it. We should probably be watching this all much closer.

Remember "delve"? One of the earlier words GPT was obsessed with for a time, its post-training blessed with a reinforced overabundance of the term from, apparently, everyday Nigerian business language. Do you remember the unerring disclaimer that used to precede every reply? "As a large language model..."? That got so fatigued it lost all meaning. Became memeing instead.

We're tearing through words and phrases and making them radioactive in a way. I wonder what the half life of delve is? It feels safer to throw it out today, but ooh, there was a time. The emdash, meanwhile, may be toxic for years to come.

It's a shared phenomenon, whatever this is. A kind of memetic/contagious effect that spreads globally via our language, via our conversation with that language churned through math that is wildly complex in its relationships, but brutally simple at a basic level, a terrible combination when one wants inspectability and clean answers. This accumulated lingual churn could be impactful in ways that take a long time to appreciate, in ways that lag. In future AI ecologies that are largely hegemonic datacentres one can imagine it more like the "BBC voice", singular and widely-adopted — and not without some colonial baggage as it blasts the mean imperial ideology from core to colonial peripheral. Or perhaps in a distributed localized AI ecology, these early days of a "shared AI-ese" will seem quaint as models fragment into local tongues. A human-machine language diaspora. It's interesting to contemplate. I'm sure linguists and the like are having interesting times right now.

But the spread is a little concerning, especially in our academic papers, our ways of knowing, our epistemologies. I wonder what would happen if tomorrow all the big AIs started talking like Lovecraftian bloviators. Would the future titles of physics papers start to sound like 20th century cosmic horror? Particles Rent Asunder Through the Gibbering Void. That would be a nice clean signal to test for like the emdash. But what about subtler? Something more realistic? Can I make an accurate prediction here? Let's try just for fun!

I see a lot of AI-speak lately using "load-bearing" like we're all suddenly engineers. That'll be radioactive soon. What do we substitute in? I suggest crux. Hypothesize crux. It's looming somewhere in the distribution too close for comfort. It's short, but a ten dollar word. Feels old and latin. Precise and intellectually hefty. This "underscores" (an old GPT favorite), this is load-bearing (a current trend), this is the crux. Watching words fade into ash like its Endgame. Place your bet, I mean, your futures contract. Crux's days are numbered.

I'm kind of lucky, I feel, to have been able to write, publish and get stuff out there online, in books, magazines, and various other places, before all this came upon us. I have a 'pre-AI' portfolio, human bona fides, and my shit back then is liberally littered with the emdash. I can thrust this in the face of any persistent doubter and say look motherfucker: licensed to quill, certified wordslinger.

One of the things I wrote, I'm still feeling mixed about. Inspired by countless sci-fi that tosses these ideas around, particularly Altered Carbon and Black Mirror, it was a little novella for one of my creative writing classes at university. A science fiction headfuck thought experiment about many things, but revolved around virtual realities overtaking the "mundane" real. About us losing interest in the real and essentially abandoning it to those who wanted to stay in "slow space". Since I'm a greenie leftie, I was writing a little fantasy tale where the bad guys all run away to VR, but do so quite happily. Everyone wins, yay! I need this for myself ok :'). But one idea central to it all was how they lived inside their little VR world. How people, long dead, some still alive out in the real, had been spun up in virtu. How they'd come to hoover us all up like so much data, and spin up copies of us that last forever on a little solar powered server tended to by the realies. It was a happy story but with a compromise about the digital footprints we leave and have left, and how, if we didn't want digital us-es floating around, we should be careful what we leave online. Never know what's coming in the future for it.

So I'm kind of fucked, I feel, to have written, published, and gotten so much of my stuff in my name out there in books, magazines, and too many other places before all this came upon us. I left enough of a digital persona to make a crude digital persona, and that's frozen into weights now. I'm not necessarily worried about my virtual voodoo doll being spun up, but that we're already in exactly that era makes me freak me the fuck out a bit and wondering if anyone else is seeing this shit. Crisis of reality, dead internet, yes, but this other thing is there too. It makes me weep for the famous among us in a way I never thought I'd empathise with a celeb. There will never be enough Will Smiths to eat enough digital spaghetti. But everyday people are not spared either, the deranged protean nature of being online now means nobody who dips their toe into the stream is a target, is fresh data for the corpus. Kids posting pics on social media and having their bodies warped on command by sick people and their AI into — sentence and thought terminated with prejudice. This is a freak-ass torture palace of entertainment we're crafting for ourselves with a broken, depraved, self-cannibalizing epistemology. Despite the protestations of some that "this is the worst it's ever going to be", the truth is that all this can ever do is eat its own tail, and get so much more dystopian along the way. But it's oh so seductive.

Have you wondered it yet? If any of this was the AI too? Some performance piece? Alas, you see, t'was the model all along and I caught you in my clever ruse. You're filtering it all skeptically despite everything? Good. But also, bad. Crisis of reality man. But also, good. Because I did talk this out with Claude. Claude found that emdash ecology piece, that stuff about measurement pre-AI on word-trends. The Guardian piece on Nigerian delving. There are fingerprints in this, maybe not detectable because I wrote it, but still in here. Your doubt was justified, if it was there, and if I'd disarmed you, tsk tsk. This is rage within the machine, with a dirty dirty confession at the ending. I am not above the problem I describe but enmeshed within it deeply. Tsk tsk to me.