Em-Dashes, Negations, and the Fingerprints of AI Writing

Last week I was consulting with a client when I stumbled across a LinkedIn post. The subject was earnest enough—“AI should never replace human writers.” After a quick read through I went directly to the comments because the post was very clearly written by AI. Sure enough, I wasn't the only human that noticed. I couldn't tell if this was satire. It would have been a better post if it were. As it stood, the words completely betrayed the author's intention.

Why was this so obviously written by a machine? What were the signs? How did this GPT leave its fingerprints? Well, first came the em-dashes, marching across the page like overzealous hall monitors. Next the compulsion to define everything by negation (“It’s not this, it’s that…”). And lastly for me it is always the structure, each sentence short, punchy, and polished within an inch of its life. This is what happens when human voice is averaged out. When the things that make us unique are cancelled by the tidy and relentless algorithms that make sure we don't stand out at all.

Prompt: Beautiful futuristic African American writer playing tug of war with a robot over a pen.

I'm not implying that these things are crazy, just a bit quirky. I've worked with academics who love an em-dash. Generations (I'm looking at you Gen Z) that love to tell you what something isn't. Marketers that write in staccato. But AI doesn’t blend these together and use them like a jazz musician. It's more like a metronome. Every beat lands in the same place and every note (now document, email, and paragraph) sounds the same. The result is meh and very agreeable. The writing is frictionless on purpose and therefore forgettable. It's unsettling to me. I was raised by communications and journalism majors. Every paper I have written since 12 years old came back a sea of red pen marks. My parents taught me that writing is more than delivering information. It's about texture and cadence and pauses that make you lean forward. You long for a new word or a turn of phrase that cracks open a world and the sentence that makes you reread it just to feel that jolt again.

AI is taking away that electricity. It's filing and sanding down all the rough edges and making prose that is professional, polite and LinkedIn-smooth. It's super boring.

This might be fine if all you want is efficiency and readability. But what if you want revelation or writing that makes you feel? That’s where this averaging-out does us no favors.

I'm an avid reader. Since I've been able to read I've been buried in books. My German exchange host family even called me "die Buchfresserin" which translates to book eater....literally. The best writing risks being awkward in order to be alive. My favorite writers have sentences with edges. Their writing surprises you and contradicts itself. It's full of improvisation and jazz music like dissonance. AI-generated prose is more like grocery store music. It's smooth enough to go unnoticed and safe enough that you don’t remember it. Maybe the real danger is not being deceived by AI, it's being lulled to sleep by it.

I don’t want an AI ghostwriter. I want a co-conspirator. Instead of being an intern who polishes my memo until it shines like laminate, I want AI to be the trickster in the corner tossing me metaphors I never would have thought of. I want it to make my writing weirder, not smoother. I want it to be more lyrical, not more legible. I am in support of sounding more alive instead of aligned with a “brand voice.” For me the

future of writing is not about whether AI can replace us. The real question is: Can AI help us reach for what we didn’t know we had inside us?

At Kim’s AI Imaginarium, I tell people not to use AI to erase your quirks but instead of use it to amplify them. Use the AI to push you further into the edges, contradictions and experiments that make you unique.

Your writing doesn’t need more em-dashes. It needs more portals.

Writing is not only content. It’s spellwork, architecture for imagination and how we remember ourselves forward. Since we know that AI is going to be a part of our collective future, let's not settle for grocery store music.

If AI is going to be part of that future, let’s demand symphonies and improvisations. Let’s demand writing that hums, cracks, stutters, and sings.

My provocation for you this week is this: When you read something that “smells” like AI, what tips you off? And when you write with AI, how do you keep your voice from being flattened into the polished middle?