More Typos, Fewer Em Dashes: Writers Are Creating an

What happened

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.

“Having my writing feel more real and authentic is my number one priority,” she says, in addition to editing her own writing because she claims an editor she hired ran the book through AI software. ” Hachette did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

” Across magazines and digital publications, this anti-AI counterstyle is reshaping in-house style and editorial practice too. Richard Fisher, an honorary professor at University College London and editor at online culture magazine Aeon, says AI has prompted him to encourage writers “to be more human” and write more conversationally. “We don't want to sand out the rough edges, because AI cannot write prose as spiky or idiosyncratic as humans.

” Mano Sundaresan became Pitchfork’s head of editorial content in July 2024, around the time LLMs became more mainstream. ” He and his fellow editors have since sent writers a memo stating that no AI may be used when filing review copy, and encouraging first-person perspectives. )

Why it matters

” 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?

” 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. “I think AI could absolutely trigger a literary counterculture,” says Robson.

” Throughout the publishing world, allegations of AI have been troubling authors. In March, Hachette pulled Mia Ballard’s horror novel Shy Girl after speculation spread online that its writer had heavily utilized AI, a claim she rejected. Ballard, who says she has new writing forthcoming, has had to restrategize.

What to watch

Likewise, Steven Rosenbaum’s book The Future of Truth, an examination of “how AI transforms reality,” was purported to include multiple fabricated quotations generated by AI, which Rosenbaum later admitted was true. ” “AI has stolen several syntactical conventions I once held dear. I miss over-deploying the em dash. I miss the rule of three, which was so satisfying. Now what—the rule of two? Five? Seven?