Free Republic

Using AI to help write? The short answer is, I don't. There is a person, Tim Boucher, who has used AI to write at least 97 books. That's impressive, but I would wager that if I got into reading one of them, it would be an intolerable slog that I wouldn't be able to get through. That is because of my observations when getting AI to experimentally generate some fiction. Everything it writes is very hackneyed, very trite material. Everything always ends up positive, everyone is happy, there is little conflict or conflict resolution, and every character has the exact...

Gen Z thinks they’ve figured out a dead giveaway that someone has used ChatGPT — and it might surprise you. The em dash (—) is punctuation loved by writers everywhere, functioning like a comma, colon or a pair of parentheses. It can be used to sum up information at the end of a sentence, encase supplementary information within a sentence, emphasize a point or expand upon something that comes before it, according to Merriam-Webster. But according to Gen Z, the dash is actually a so-called “ChatGPT hyphen.” The phenomenon started gaining attention online after podcasters Daisy Reed and Sapna Rao,...