It’s wild how grammar and punctuation have been sliding for decades, and then AI shows up promising to improve people’s writing—cleaner punctuation, better phrasing, the whole thing. But now the moment someone uses an ellipsis, an em-dash, or even a pre-AI turn of phrase, people scream ā€œAI-generated!ā€ as if creativity suddenly died in 2023.

So what happens? People start intentionally dumbing down their writing to ā€œsound humanā€ā€”dropping letters, misspelling on purpose, leaning into this bizarre redneck-meets-valley-girl shorthand… all to avoid being accused of using the very tools that were supposed to elevate them.

Meanwhile... vibe coding is widely celebrated as a way to boost productivity, riff new ideas, and accelerate creativity without outsourcing a thing—yet proper writing is treated like a suspicious artifact.

Don’t let any machine think for you. A tool is a tool. If you hand over every part of your mind—coding, writing, reasoning—to a system, that’s not empowerment, that’s dependency. Writers have used ghostwriters for decades. Students have used Grammarly for faster checks. None of that made them less human. It just made the workflow easier… as long as they stayed in the driver’s seat.

Idiocracy really is at hand.

We have tools that could resurrect proper spelling, punctuation, and grammar—and instead there’s a social reward for sounding like you flunked eighth-grade English.

Not me.

Aside from a few modern conventions—using ā€œIā€ sparingly to avoid sounding like a narcissist, or using some degree of shorthand in private texts for efficiency—I’m going to keep writing properly. I’m going to keep using full sentences. I wrote this way long before AI, and writing has always been one of my strongest skills. I refuse to degrade it for anyone or anything.

#IKITAO #AvaQuotes

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Discussion

I'm a heavy user of em dash. I used it before the AI craze, as did many good writers.

It was with AI that my learning has been accelerated, and an origin point for quite a few of my book buying flurries. I'm okay with that šŸ¤·ā€ā™€ļø

It improved my writing during my undergrad work. But I also only used it as an editor. That encourages learning. The people who cheat or just prompt everything probably don't learn. I can imagine they atrophy if anything.

Love the nuanced take, that highlights the difference between using a tool for efficiency and being enslaved by it. It's definitely the missing middle in thus conversation.

The em dash thing really bothers me. I was a prolific em dash user and now I avoid them.

i love going back through some of my old writing and seeing how much i overused "—" even back then—and also seeing how cringe some of it was xD

I was an English major in college and it makes me sad that I can't write properly anymore because it's just assumed I used AI to do it.

so spot on and couldn't say it better 🫔

very fascinating shift of modern society. I am curious what the future holds for us with the tools we have. Either we use it to better and help humanity or to use it to destroy us. I hope on the former. šŸ«‚šŸ™

Eat shoots and leaves.

I can only assume AI got heavily trained on my writing -- I've been using (and abusing) the emdash before it was cool.

nostr:nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7ct4w35zumn0wd68yvfwvdhk6qg0waehxw309ahxjup3xuhxxmmdqqsdngef474mycag4usksw8tghslqnxrqqrsg3jfglztjplphm6cp4c7auuy5 and I would rather write ourselves instead of using AI. That's why I'm doing a FediWriMo challenge, actually.

Wut dafuq u talking bout scrow?

"You are an unfit mother. Your children will be placed in the custody of Carl’s Jr. Carl’s Jr… ā€˜Fuck You, I’m Eating.'ā€

– Carl’s Jr. Machine

But seriously...

It' s got electrolytes!!!

Brilliant take!