How to spot AI text.
There is a punctuation mark in English that is can be used when you want to emphasise as break or a pause. It is called an em-dash and it looks like this “—”. I bet you rarely use it. In fact, as an experiment, try and type an em-dash in an email right now.
How did you go? Did you figure it out?
If you are like me then, you probably struggled. Here is the thing though — ChatGPT loves using em-dashes. It does it all the time. Here is a line from an sports article I was reading this week.
I don’t understand why there should be an increased focus on him – and all these calls – and non-calls – show that. How is that a thing in our game?
Three em-dashes in one sentence (and a normal dash too!). This is a clue that AI was used to create this article. More than likely it was given a task of taking a rough draft and extending it to a certain word count or cleaning it up to make it sound more authoritative.
So if you see a lot of these dashes in something you are reading then you should strongly suspect it involved AI to some extend.
There is another clue as well…using a comma before “and”. This is commonly known as the Oxford Comma. Most humans tend to ignore the rather complicated rules about when to use a comma before “and” in a sentence. Of course the purists will point out that there are grammatical rules that cover this usage and I am not here to challenge them, I am just saying most people are not overly bothered by it.
AI however applies a strict interpretation of these comma rules and I notice it because I use it A LOT!
Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that AI is a bad thing. I really only have two main points to make:
If you see multiple em-dashes and Oxford Commas then you are likely to be reading the work of an AI.
When you are using AI, make sure you ask it not to use dashes. The comma thing is up to you!
