The New Rule of Writing in the AI Age: Don’t Be Too Good
Today, one of my final papers came back. I got a grade that I am really happy about. The only issue my professor had was that I did not italicize the title of the newspaper that I was writing about throughout my paper. Yet I knew before handing it in that newspaper titles are supposed to be italicized. Leaving the title improperly formatted was an intentional signal to him that I, not ChatGPT, wrote it.
I think AI and its use in academic writing has produced an incentive for students to write a little imperfectly. There is a lingering anxiety that if I submit a piece of work that is too well-written or formatted perfectly, the professor will just assume that AI has written it. Therefore, the goal has shifted from writing well to writing in a way that signals a human wrote it.
This does not solely apply to college essays, but is also prevalent in every aspect of writing nowadays. Even in my blog, I sometimes degrade my writing to a level for the sole purpose of signaling authenticity.
I used to be an avid em-dash user. But a year ago, I, like everyone else, cut it out of my writing completely, as it was an obvious fingerprint of LLMs.
There is an underlying anxiety with all of this, and it is that the new gold in writing is the appearance of authenticity rather than authenticity itself.
What gets lost is the actual conversation about writing. The question of whether people are developing a voice, engaging with ideas, and doing intellectual work. All of it is being flattened into a binary: human or machine. And in trying to land on the right side of that binary, people like me are, in small ways, making ourselves worse writers.