The em dash has somehow become an AI disclaimer.
People are suddenly removing certain punctuation, changing their tone, adding little imperfections — all to prove: “I wrote this myself.”
Funny how fast we got here.
The Authenticity Flip
Not long ago, people were proudly sharing AI-generated portraits of themselves. Now the conversation has flipped to detection, watermarking, and proving that content is “authentic.”
Anthropic saying it will watermark AI-generated text tells us something about where this is heading.
Two Assumptions
Maybe two assumptions are forming at the same time:
- AI companies think AI is becoming good enough to pass as human.
- Humans think AI is becoming good enough to replace them.
I’m not convinced by either.
AI Did Not Create the Problem
Authenticity was already a problem long before AI. AI didn’t create performative expertise, fake confidence, recycled opinions, or content written mainly for algorithms.
It just industrialized them.
And perhaps that’s the bigger risk: not that AI becomes indistinguishable from human intelligence, but that human communication gradually optimizes itself to the level of machine-generated content.
The problem may not be artificial intelligence becoming too intelligent. It may be societal intelligence becoming more artificial.
And yes — I used an em dash and AI to generate an image 🤘