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 “AI-generated!” as if creativity suddenly died in 2023. So what happens? People start intentionally dumbing down their writing to “sound human”—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 “I” 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

Replies (27)

Kudzai Kutukwa's avatar
Kudzai Kutukwa 8 months ago
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 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.
Really well put. It is my opinion that people are anti-AI because we have regressed so much as a society that using things like proper grammar is just unheard of at this point. View quoted note →
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. 🫂🙏
I can only assume AI got heavily trained on my writing -- I've been using (and abusing) the emdash before it was cool.
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.
"You are an unfit mother. Your children will be placed in the custody of Carl’s Jr. Carl’s Jr… ‘Fuck You, I’m Eating.'” – Carl’s Jr. Machine But seriously... image
Schnur's avatar
Schnur 1 month ago
Great post here: When ever I make grammar mistakes, English is not my first language.
Ava's avatar Ava
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 “AI-generated!” as if creativity suddenly died in 2023. So what happens? People start intentionally dumbing down their writing to “sound human”—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 “I” 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
View quoted note →
One friend called the Bob Dylan's painting from my substack letter (https://aillia.substack.com/p/roads-less-traveled) "awful AI slop, not even a good one." Another said the whole piece "feels AI-generated". People's attitudes are messed up in an interesting way: they can't differentiate anymore: everything is suspect as AI slop. Thanks to this, we've entered Hesse’s Age of the Feuilleton from The Glass Bead Game: "The most important consequence of this new attitude… was that men largely ceased to produce works of art. Moreover, intellectuals gradually withdrew from the bustle of the world." I'm 100% anonymous/pseudonymous = I can’t prove I'm not a bot anymore. The only "proof" left seems to be historical records, ID, or biometrics... and that's not happening in my case. At least Bob Dylan never had to prove he isn’t a bot to anyone :))
That certainly seems to be the reason they gave. I only skimmed the article and report, but it sounds like they took issue with more than just the grammar and writing style. They didn't seem particularly fond of the content or conclusions either.