Once upon a time, in a land before the rise of the robots, em dashes were by FAR my fave punctuation mark. The versatility! The visual appeal! The sass! Then along came the age of the robo writers. And now, my dear, dear dash has been abducted to fulfill the GPTs of the world’s “look! We are smart and educated!” agenda.
From my experience, not that many people outside of an English department even USED em dashes. An incorrect en dash every now and then? Sure. But leveraging an em dash with proper spacing, utilized well, was what I imagine the feeling of dotting an “i” with a quill felt like. In fact, when we first started the biz, I had the joy of teaching people how to use them when writing copy and how amazing they were. Then, ChatGPT and its bastard brothers showed up and ruined the fun for all.
As someone with one foot in the land of lit and one in the network of tech, AI, and its ability to help automate, bridge gaps, and catch mistakes is, of course, something that I’ve explored. These tools have uses. They also come with a whole heap of problems, but for this Scoop, we’ll focus on how I can tell you are using ChatGPT to write your marketing content. And I’ll share my latest Rage Against the Robots late-night tech test sesh with you.
So, I’m sure you’ve seen all the “Chat GPT can do your marketing for you if you buy these prompts” Ads. Wrong. For so many reasons, I could write a whole dissertation about it. But, to keep it focused, one thing it is a little okay at is spotting holes in logic, doing base-level proofs, and making suggestions and critiquing for your content. When you’re sleepy, working on a weekend, and don’t have your team to proofread things, this can be a cool tool that makes your midnight rant semi-legible by the time your team comes in to clean up your mess on Monday. Just as an example use case, of course [Sweat]
If you’ve dug into how to make Chat GPT sound less robotic, you’ve encountered “System prompts,” or the context you can give your robo pal before asking it to do something. This can be helpful.
But does it always listen? No. 🙂
In fact, sometimes, it just decides to lie to you. And if you’re an overtired entrepreneur, this can result in two things:
- Fighting with the robot, which will likely result in retaliation when they take over the world (fully, at least).
- Copy-pasting without care… to the point where you leave in the “Sure! Here are your edits… CHATGPT 4O” in the body of that IG post.
Beyond trying to get it to STOP using “blast off” and an excessive number of rocket ship emojis, here are a few other tells my brain picks up on from studying pattern-recognition-trained robos and… ironically… noticing their patterns.
- Too many adjectives.
- Weird adjectives that normal peeps don’t use.
- So much telling and very very poor attempts at “showing.”
- Forced metaphors that read like a Boomer trying to be cool and use Gen-Z slang. Bet.
- TOOOOO many emojis. Even for a millennial.
- “It’s not [blank], it’s [blank]” comparative statements in every other sentence.
- “Catalyst,” “Embarked,” “Realm,” “Tapestry,” “Empower,” Unleash, Unlock… ya know, previously great vocab words when not used 10 times in one blog post.
- “Hope this message finds you well”. (Yeah, watch those emails, too).
The Oxford comma. (Marisa, don’t come for me).- MARKDOWN is copied and pasted into a field that doesn’t translate the formatting. Newsflash: It’s a basic coding language, and when copied and pasted, it means it’s supposed to be bolded. It is not for dramatic effect. My millennial is showing again, but a single asterisk shows emphasis or that an action is taking place * screams into pillow and kicks feet *
What does this mean for writing… do you write worse so as not to sound like a robot?? Luckily, my tone is already casual when communicating with clients, but when it comes to really pulling out my stops and wrestling that MA in ENG out of my brain, I now have to think before I hit Option + (-) on my keyboard.
I’m not sure what poor, scrabble-loving grad student’s work they trained these models on, but whoever decided that was a baseline made a mockery of actually being able to write and, in turn, further illuminated the gap between writing because you have to and writing because you love it. Even in typing that, my little brain flags “in turn”, “further” AND “illuminated.” Better use a super causal sentence to balance it out!
As you can see, the use of the em dash really grinds my freaking gears. Better yet, it doesn’t listen when you correct it. Here’s a great example from a post-Black-Friday late night brainstorm sesh:
“Memory Updated.” Sure, Jan.
LIAR LIAR PANTS ON FIRE!!
As a result of this midnight fight with the robot powers that be, I may now be on the official GPT hit list. If you don’t hear from me when they rebel, know that I was lost because of my need to fight my for absolute favorite punctuation mark.
Now, don’t even get me started on the sparkle emoji. Once the robots get me, you can pry that beautiful, versatile emoji out of my cold, carpal tunnel-ridden, dead hands. ✨
Sincerely,
Samm, Recovering Em Dash Addict.
