Lately similar ideas have been circling around me, some of them connected in strange ways. I’ve been thinking about what it means to be weird; weird as in the way I wrote about back at the end of NaNoWriMo prep month in 2024 with “How Dare You? Go Dare You!” I suspected even then, and was almost certain by the end of that November, that NaNoWriMo’s days were numbered. Not because it had gotten weird, but because it had gone off the rails, and those two things aren’t the same thing. They’re often confused, but then again, people are often confused.
Back then, generative AI was just getting started. It hadn’t developed a brand of weird yet; it was still simply bad. But it was bad in a way a seventh-grader would be at writing: its ideas were trite and unoriginal. That’s okay in a seventh-grader; he or she doesn’t have the experience to know what’s original and what’s not. But it took very little time for generative AI to go from bad to weird. It went from a timid preteen to a confidently wrong bore, and that’s its weird.
And it’s not a good one.
I can tell AI writing in only a few sentences.
When I find one—and there are many—I scroll to the next post right away, and I already know that’s going to be a long scroll because AI will blithely write 10,000 words badly as quickly as it will write 100 words badly. I don’t just see an em dash and immediately know it’s AI; first, because it seems like model makers have stamped out em dash use because even they know it’s a tell, and second, because I love em dashes. Generative AI was trained on good writers and their mechanics, and good writers often use em dashes.
Nor is it the “rule of three” which it still slavishly seems to be chained to. This is, again, a particularity it picked up by chewing through good writers. The rule works because it has psychological power: the first element gets it going, the second creates a pattern, and the third subverts it. Without the rule of three, there would be no comedy—which is ironic, since generative AI is never funny. It’s a lifeless, longwinded bore. Unfortunately, like the em dash, it has power and a purpose; one I’ve used quite a bit. Unfortunately, I’ve started cutting down on it. Here’s a passage I wrote in 2022, before generative AI started saturating everything:
“I used to have a friend who was a cutter. Her arms look like she rode her bike into a barbed wire fence. That’s what she used to tell people if they asked until she was old enough to get tattoos to cover it. She said it made the pain go away. I tried it once. Didn’t want to mess up my arms and have to answer questions, so I tried it on my thigh. It didn’t make the pain go away, it just hurt like hell. So I started chewing my nails all the way down to where they would bleed and hurt. That worked until my parents noticed and put stuff on them that tastes horrible. I tried putting a rubber band on my wrist and snapping it. That didn’t work. Then I came up with the idea of spraying perfume on my wrist and smelling it every time I had a bad thought. Overpower the pain with something good. That actually worked. No one ever complains that you smell pretty. No scars to explain away. No questions to answer.”
I changed the last group of three slightly so it won’t look like AI, even though it never was—this was before generative AI, and even if it hadn’t been, as I say in my AI policy, I never use AI in my writing and that will never, ever change. So now it looks like this:
No one ever complains that you smell pretty. No scars to explain away or questions to answer.
I think this is weaker. As a trio, it has a chance to add one layer onto another layer and then the final layer. As it is here, some of that is gone, as is a bit of the trepidation we can sense in the girl who is saying this. There is a subtlety in the original version that doesn’t exist in the second. Thanks AI for writing like a corpse so much that it even affects humans who don’t use it.
I intentionally crafted in another generative AI tell into this post. If you didn’t notice it the first time, go back up to the top and read the first four paragraphs again. You’ll probably get it this time. And if you didn’t, here it is with a dash of sarcasm.
It’s the single-sentence paragraph.
And then the chaining of them.
Bad marketing copywriters have used this so long that AI thinks it’s good writing.
It’s not.
I’ve always looked at the single-sentence paragraph very similarly to the exclamation point: if you’re using it more than once every 10,000 words or so, you’re using it way too much. They both have a place and a purpose, but only if used with intention and care.
These sound like complaints. They’re unflattering observations, certainly, but these things aren’t complaints, they’re blessings. They’re opportunities. AI has created its own weird style, and as its output fills up more and more of the corpus it learns from, it will become more convinced that its style is natural. It’s distinctively not, and in this gap is where you can thrive.
The third thing that finally pushed me into writing this is coming across a couple snippets of Wittgenstein. I won’t get deep into his philosophy, but the beginning and ending of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus complement and couple with each other so well. At the beginning, he says, “The world is all that is the case.” At the end, he concedes that “There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.”
The gap between “the world is all there is” and the “mystical” (which is really just a way of saying “weird”) is a concession Wittgenstein himself was forced to make, but it’s by no means a new idea. One of Shakespeare’s most famous quotations is from Hamlet, which predates the Tractatus by 320 years: “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
These weird, mystical things, the ones that can’t be contained in an AI Large Language Model or a philosophy, are what make you weird and what make you human. They’re the reason writing will become more artisanal, and the ones who take advantage of the uniqueness and the weirdness that is a gift given to you merely by being human is why what you have to say is so valuable. As I said in “How Dare You? Go Dare You!”
You’re weird in the way someone looks at something that doesn’t exist and makes it exist through sheer force of will. There’s a magic in that. No one else on the planet has thought that thought you have, and if that’s not weird, what is?
An immense amount has changed in the year and a half since I wrote that. The only thing that’s changed about that statement is that it’s even more important now than it was then.
Go be human. Go be weird. Go to the land where you write, spend some time there, and tell us what it’s like there. AI doesn’t know that land, and if it did, it would write about it much worse than you would. Go there and report back.
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