Generative AI steals everything – so we made something it can’t understand

Remember that bath scene half-way through Saltburn? Where Oliver (Barry Keoghan) spies on his mate having a bit of ‘alone time’ in the bathtub, then sneaks in and slurps up the bathwater-and-bodily-fluids solution from the drain.

From there, the film takes a darker turn. We start to understand that, far from being the straightforward, innocent student mate, Oliver’s actually a twisted, manipulative Ripley-esque nutter on a mission to take over the Catton family’s estate.

I bring this up not to traumatize you, but to posit a comparison.

In the parallel, ChatGPT is Oliver. Saltburn is the marketing, creative and communications industries. A seemingly warm and helpful character has come into our lives, with a persona designed to earn our trust. An entity that offers support and a sympathetic ear, agreeably and unassumingly. But while it can help us streamline the ways we create, express ourselves and communicate, it has the potential to become something much darker and more Black Mirror-esque.

The tragic death of the em dash

Let’s specifically think about writing. Joan Didion once said, “I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking.” But if you remove the ‘thinking’ from writing, where does that leave us? Who are we, as creatives, marketers, and humans if our writing is disconnected from our thinking?

Every creative thinker has a well they return to in their head. A well of experiences, learnings, thoughts and feelings that they draw on to express an idea, tell a story, or make a persuasive argument. AI has redirected this passage in our minds away from the well, to the prompt box of ChatGPT.

At least so far, this heist on our thinking-brains hasn’t been without incriminating evidence. Early outputs of generative AI models were just plain bad; more recently, they’ve improved, but with certain giveaways.

To wit: ChatGPT can be so liberal with em dashes that the latter – that venerable punctuation mark previously best known as the favorite of Emily Dickinson – has unwittingly become the ‘ChatGPT hyphen’. It’s a tell-tale sign that the words in front of you have been generated, not written.

Thus, the em dash became, in the sweep of a billion lines of generated text, persona non grata in the punctuation world.

For generations, the em dash has been a versatile bridge for hopping between thoughts, emotions, and ideas. Dickens shaped his morality tales with it, Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness flowed through it, Kerouac let it drive his jazz-like prose. Today, Sally Rooney threads it through her quiet truths of the heart.

I think therefore I am (dash)

If generative AI has killed the em dash (for now), we need something else to carry its weight. And we need to know that AI was never anywhere near the works of those future Dickinses, Woolfs and Rooneys.

So we created a completely new punctuation mark: the am dash. It's unusable by AI, so using it is a clear sign that your words have been written by a human.

Inspired by Descartes age-old maxim 'cogito, ergo sum' (I think, therefore I am), the am dash is a symbolic gesture of human over machine. A call for less prompting and more provoking. A love letter to craft. A simple way we, as writers, can stamp our humanity across our words and make ourselves heard. It’s available for writers everywhere to download and use via two crafted fonts – Times New Human and Areal – at theamdash.com.

None of this is to shit on ChatGPT or to say you can’t use AI for writing. But there’s writing and there’s writing. Banging out a list of product features for a report isn’t the same as writing a letter to your mum; putting together a travel itinerary for your upcoming weekend away is different to writing a get-it-all-off-my-chest note to your ex; compiling a shopping list isn’t as nuanced as writing a headline for an Economist ad.

Keep those two kinds of writing – like Church and State – separate, and we’re golden. Blur the lines and we’re buggered. Like the Catton family in Saltburn.

Because, in the quest for efficiency, we’ve somehow gone from automating our timesheets to handing over the stuff that really matters. The stuff that makes us human. As that Joanna Maciejewska quote that went viral on social media put it, “I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.”

The battle for the soul of writing is in full swing. The human fightback starts here. Our ambition is for it to be embraced and used in writing of all kinds. A symbol, a signal, a flag in the sand.

If we don’t get this seemingly helpful guest under control, it could end up (metaphorically!) dancing a crazed, naked jig through the wreckage of our lives.