AUTHOR PROVENANCE STATEMENT: The following text was angrily touch-typed by me, Gabriel Cassady, in Apple Notes on my Mac (mostly) on Monday, December 29, 2025 (first published 12/31/25)—AI was not used to draft, edit, write, or do anything else with or to the following text. Merry Christmas/Happy Holidays—have a happy New Year!
I’ve used dashes of all kinds in my writing since college—mostly because my thoughts move annoyingly fast, and I don’t want to slow down to make a cleaner punctuation decision.
I love writing, and I’m passionate about AI. Sometimes I use AI to help me brainstorm or to write first-drafts for things I otherwise find interminably boring to write.
Our cultural tendency to pejoratively label the use of new tech as “taking a shortcut” or otherwise “lesser than” is an emotional self-defense strategy that makes us feel safe and reassured that we’re somehow immune from the spread of technological progress. If that describes you, then—In the words of Chapelle Roan—good luck babe!
If you ever feel the need to question my expertise, please—by all means—call me, put me on the spot, put me on stage, quiz me. I’ll prove to you beyond any doubt—any day, any time—that I have the skills, experience, and knowledge I claim to possess.
Soon enough, the term “AI slop” will go the way of the term “Nazi”, which is to say it’ll be overused to the point of becoming nothing more than a shallow, childish insults—an ad hominem attack lazily lobbed at people we disagree with on one topic or another.
If I’m telling the honest-to-God truth, there’s a teeny-tiny part of me that wonders if AI’s penchant for em dash use actually came from me or, at very least, folks like me. I’ve been continually using, testing, and tinkering with a variety of AI tools since 2022—long before most providers even gave you the option to opt-out of training datasets. Hell, most folks don’t even know how to properly use commas—let alone dashes.
More recently, the one element that most often makes me, personally, wonder if an email was written by AI isn’t an em dash—rather, it’s using “Hi” in the salutation. But I wouldn’t put money on it, and you shouldn’t either. The most current and credible research indicates that humans are no better than chance at determining whether a piece of content was created by an AI or by a human.
Oh, but you’re special, aren’t you?
Seriously, though, instead of letting your biases automatically—and, most likely, erroneously—sort content into “AI” versus “not AI” buckets, maybe you could first try to simply determine if the writing is good or bad, truthful or deceptive, relevant or ignorable. Ultimately, those are the content qualities that really matter. How does the writing make you feel? Who or what would want to make you feel that way and why? Those are the kinds of questions you should be asking—not “was this touch-typed by a talking ape?”
Be honest—before AI came along, were you a world-class writer at work? Did you love touch-typing copy for mass emails? Were you deeply passionate about writing advertising copy or cranking out internal documentation? Did day-after-day of manual typing spark joy in your soul? If so, please contact me. I have so many questions. I want to meet your parents and figure out how they managed to give birth to the perfect worker bee. The rest of us want to spend less time click-clacking on a keyboard and more time outside or otherwise doing whatever the hell we damn-well please.
Call me crazy, call my writing “slop”, say what you want—you’ll have to pry my em dashes from my cold, dead fingers.
