In grad school, one of my professors (who’s since then become a dear mentor and friend) called me in after submitting an assignment. He had a reputation for being tough, direct, no-nonsense, and he’d tell you exactly what you did/got wrong, and where. I thought for sure “uh oh, I totally bombed this. Oh well, I’ll go in and face the music.”

Instead, he looked at me, astonished, and basically said something to the effect of “Jay, this is brilliant! You do write somewhere, right? Please tell me you have a blog or something. You have a gift and a talent, keep nurturing it, don’t ever let it go slack, you need to keep putting your work out there in the world.”

So yeah, you can understand why I find it so annoying that the anti-AI mob has made it so I can’t use things like em dashes, triads, or contrastive parallel structures (not to mention chains of fancy words like that o e you just read) without risking the Eye of Sauron turning on me. And why I (and so many other writers) have to keep mangling my voice, first to appease this mob of troglodytes, and now to appease a faceless and (highly) flawed detector. All because I learned to write, and enjoy writing, the same way the machines learned to write, and the people who are too stupid and illiterate of the craft now get to set the terms of the debate, and are actively degrading the quality of human prose, all to supposedly defend it (that’s BS, btw… the only thing they’re defending is their own ego, and their ability to avoid thinking about their own sad little lives, by making themselves feel morally superior to the writers they accuse; hence my term “moral cosplayers”).

It’s also why I refuse to show “proof” of anything — (oooh no, an em dash! Guess I’m a robot now) because a) no matter what I’d show would never be enough for these people, and b) I don’t owe these vicious morons squat. If they can’t make their own determination without a machine telling them what to think (oh, the irony), and if they don’t know what good prose has always looked like (em dashes, lists of three, etc), then frankly, they’re not smart enough for my content anyway.