More Typos, Fewer Em Dashes: Writers Are Creating an Anti-AI ‘Literary Counterculture’

Novelists, journalists, and power LinkedIn posters are embracing first-person narratives and idiosyncrasies to avoid being mistaken for chatbots.

Last year, when the novelist Laura Brooke Robson began writing Love Is an Algorithm—a love story between the cofounder of an AI dating app and a musician trying to survive in the age of large language models—she took extra care not to sound like AI herself.

She wrote sentences she doubts she would have attempted before the advent of LLMs, avoiding what she calls “wishy-washy metaphors,” and took “a more winding path to avoid an em dash or a tripartite list.”

Since the widespread adoption of LLMs, Robson says her writing has fundamentally changed for the better, becoming a deliberate inverse of what she sees as AI’s default lack of style.

“I find myself writing less mechanically,” she says. “I have this urge to make little mistakes, like winks to the reader, to show that there’s a human behind the words. Like: What if I just invented a phrase? What if I did something unexpected with my punctuation?”

Robson is part of a larger cohort of writers who are practicing what could be called an anti-AI writing style. Across journalism, criticism, creative writing, and especially among compulsive LinkedIn posters, writers are converging on a set of choices that implicitly resist the trappings of AI-generated prose.

The style mostly takes shape through negation, often of the obvious AI tells, like lists of three, passive voice, not x but y, and em dashes. But it also prizes idiosyncrasy as its overriding principle, tapping into specific first-person anecdotes and eccentric similes that demonstrate the necessary drudgery of writing.

To read the full article on wired.com, click here