The Chicago marketing agency Leff Communications put out a video last week in which production editor Morgan Strunsky urged people not to let “flagxiety”—the fear of having your writing flagged as AI-generated—stop them from using em dashes in their writing.
Hear—hear!
But anyone who’s worried their writing will be flagged as AI-written should have been worried for years that their writing was being dismissed quietly for its lack of style and unique point of view and original ideas.
Which is a lot of people, in the period since it became a professional requirement for every white-collar worker bee to purport to offer consistent “thought leadership” on LinkedIn.
When I came into the communication business three decades ago, there were trade publications whose editors and columnists did the thinking for the profession. We published letters to the editor from practitioners who objected or amplified those ideas.
When the Internet came in, another relative handful of new voices came in, some of them speaking loudly and well on online forums and with their own blogs. But those folks were always outliers, and there was absolutely zero pressure for every working communicator to be a talking head, too—and in some cases, there was pressure against it.
Not that those were the good old days.
But great writers and iconic thinkers are rare, in any profession, in any society. And if my LinkedIn contacts are now using AI to compose their important-sounding drivel, they don’t have to worry about being “flagged” by me, because I probably stopped eating their prose porridge years ago—after the first or second serving.
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