What the Dickens?

Everyone knows how a Tale of Two Cities starts. It is probably one of the most well known beginnings to any piece of literature:

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only."

What you might not know is that there is an em dash in this most famous of introductions. Did AI write it?

Stranger yet is what this introduction means. It could have been written today about AI. We are living in a time full of contradictions. Some people see progress and wisdom, others see ignorance and decline. There is strong belief and deep doubt, hope and despair, light and darkness. For some, it feels like everything is possible; for others, nothing makes sense. Some people believe we are heading toward something better, others toward complete disaster. And those that shout the loudest insist on seeing only in extremes.

One of these extremes is how AI influenced output is lazy, can easily be detected and shouldn't be used or listened to.

And, quite honestly, I’ve had enough. Enough of posts that all say the same thing. Nothing of insight, nothing to change our practice, or challenge our assumptions. Just this endless churn of recycled complaints, worn-out observations, and smug certainty about things people barely understand.

It’s everywhere. Scroll for five minutes and you’ll see it. Someone ranting about how “you can tell something’s written by AI” because of a punctuation mark or a sentence that sounds a little too balanced. The whole argument ends there. No consideration of what’s actually being said. No attempt to examine the ideas or question whether the point being made might actually be useful. Just this relentless obsession with spotting what people are calling “tells.”

Apparently, we’ve decided that the most pressing crisis in writing is whether a dash appears too often. Not whether the content makes sense. Not whether it brings anything new. Just punctuation or phrasing.

I don’t even know what people think they’re achieving anymore. Do they really believe that spotting a certain type of punctuation or phrasing gives them some kind of superpower? That a long dash in a sentence is enough to declare, with total confidence, that AI generated the whole piece? It’s completely and utterly absurd, as highlighted in the introduction to this article. And yet, here we are, wading through this nonsense daily now, while anything with actual weight goes unseen. That’s the way the LinkedIn algorithm works. The more comments, the more it gets seen. So, all we see now is meaningless noise!

Can you tell what’s been written with AI? Well, no actually. You really can’t. Not if the person using the tool knows what they’re doing. Not if they’re a thoughtful poster. Not if they understand the language. Not if they’ve reworked the output until it reflects something that matters. Not if they’ve cut out all the parts that sound overly AI, or don’t make a specific point. Not even if they’ve used “Not if” five times in succession! And even if it did begin with AI, so what? If the writing is strong, if the ideas are clear, if the argument stands up to scrutiny, then who cares what helped shape the first draft?

But that’s not how people are treating it. They’re treating the use of tools like some kind of scandal. Like the very existence of support somehow disqualifies the work. Like using a spell checker, a thesaurus, a grammar app like Grammarly, or even an editor somehow makes a piece less real. And please hear me. You might think it is, but that’s not critical thinking, no matter what your view of AI. That’s gatekeeping dressed up as discernment.

Part of the irony (and the frustration) is that it’s not even good gatekeeping. The em dash has become this strange litmus test for a lot of people. They see it, and the alarm bells go off. “Ah-ha!” they say, “That’s not natural.” Really? Have they never read classic literature? As if no writer before 2023 ever used that piece of punctuation. It didn’t arrive with LLMs (or even word processors). It existed long before that. Jane Austen used it. We've seen that Dickens used it. So did many other writers before computers even existed. Emily Dickinson used it constantly. In fact, her entire written rhythm relied on that mark. The dash is part of the rhythm of English writing. It’s a pause. A shift. A way to play with tone and structure. It didn’t appear with AI. It’s not new. It’s just another tool. And phrasing patterns signalling AI. There can't be another opening to a book that has such clear phrasing as that of A Tale of Two Cities. It is classic "AI structure". What the dickens?

But apparently, the presence of a dash or a neat transition or a slightly formal or repeated phrase is all it takes now to declare a piece worthless. No reading required to assess the quality of the content. Just a swift public dismissal based on absolutely nothing of substance. And, somewhat ironically, there’s little actual thought with all of this. Posters who use AI regularly will remove em dashes from GPT output because they know what other people will think. And those who don’t use AI, but have always used hyphens or em dashes, get accused of being AI. It’s ridiculous.

And the result of all this? People who are giving their time, who are trying to create something that challenges, something that probes at the edges of our current understanding, are being drowned out. Their work is not just ignored. It’s brushed aside. Not because it’s wrong, not because it lacks clarity, but because it doesn’t match some fantasy version of what authentic writing is supposed to look like. Or worse, because the algorithm doesn’t surface it due to all the banality that gets the likes and comments.

This is where it gets personal. I write because I care about ideas. That’s it. As a freelancer I have quiet times where I can spend time thinking, and drafting articles that I hope will be of interest and be informative to others. I don’t have an angle. I’m not fishing for sales, or followers, or status. I just want to share things that I think matter. I want to ask questions most people don’t ask out loud. I want to get under the skin of things. The history. The logic. The inconsistencies. That’s the whole reason I spend time doing this. Because I believe the world needs more thinking, not less. And I am, maybe naively, hoping that people with more knowledge than me will enter the discussion and help provide the answers, or at least move the conversation forward.

But every time I post something that took real time and effort, it gets swallowed by the algorithm and ignored by the audience. And I’m not talking about ego here. I don’t need your applause. But what I do need, or had at least hoped for, was conversation. Debate. Critique. Pushback. Reflection. A few people willing to think beyond the obvious and maybe offer something of their own in response. That’s what I had hoped LinkedIn would be.

Instead, the conversation is dominated by surface-level noise. Another post about how AI is making writing worse. Another comment thread about the morality of using tools. Another person pretending to care about integrity while contributing absolutely nothing to the discussion.

It’s exhausting. And again, the irony is that those who complain that AI is producing no original thought are bombarding LinkedIn and other platforms with no original thought!

And I’m tired of seeing thoughtful content passed over because it doesn't fit the current panic. I’m tired of people pretending to care about creativity while parroting the same criticisms word for word. I’m tired of watching lazy posts get celebrated while good writing – real writing, careful writing – is dismissed with a shrug (yes, I put some em dashes in there just to annoy…if Dickens did it then I can)

It’s nonsense. Utter nonsense. You can’t take a single punctuation mark and build a whole theory on it. And yet that’s what people are doing. They don’t read the argument. They skim the surface. They find a dash or two and say, “This must be machine-written,” and that’s it. No need to read further. No need to engage with the thought. The entire piece is thrown out based on a shape on the page.

What bothers me more than this lazy analysis is what it’s doing to people who actually care about putting thoughtful content into the world. People who spend real time shaping ideas, structuring arguments, cutting what doesn’t need to be there, and refining language until the meaning comes through cleanly. We’re being drowned out. Not because we’re saying anything wrong, but because we aren’t shouting the same shallow complaints everyone else is shouting.

And it raises a serious question. What exactly are we celebrating or rewarding?

Because if this is what we want to reward, if likes and shares and comments go to the people who shout the loudest about the most trivial things, then how do we expect anything meaningful to thrive? Why would anyone put the effort in if the result is silence?

I’ll spend hours researching something. Reading background material. Thinking about angles, contradictions, gaps in logic. I’ll shape an article slowly, carefully. Cut it back. Check the flow. Rephrase awkward sections. Try to make it land without hitting people over the head (maybe not with this article). I post it and wait.

Nothing.

Maybe three people like it. Maybe one or two actually read to the end. And then, next to it, someone posts the same AI-bashing post that’s already been posted fifty times. The same complaint about the same features. No new insight. No development. But it explodes. Dozens of comments. Hundreds of likes. People congratulating each other for recognising "the signs."

It's maddening.

And please understand what I am trying to say. This isn’t really about my posts (although I have obviously felt the impact). This is about an evolving culture that’s rejecting thought in favour of performance. It’s about a system that’s so focused on who or what wrote something that it no longer cares about what’s being said.

This is clearly a crisis of attention. A collapse of seriousness. And it’s being fed by people who claim to be worried about the influence of AI, but many of whom are actually just bored and looking for something to feel clever about. The same people who claim they care about original thinking, who say they value depth and reason, are the ones jumping all over the lowest effort posts. They aren’t evaluating ideas. They’re hunting for patterns, for clues, like AI detection is some kind of game. But this isn’t a game. It’s making genuine engagement harder and harder to come by.

And if you’re one of the people wondering whether it matters who wrote something, ask yourself this: when you read something that really moves you, something that makes you pause and reconsider something you believed, do you check whether the writer used a typewriter or a laptop? Do you care whether they had help editing? Do you care whether they dictated it aloud or wrote it by hand? Do you even care whether they had a ghost writer?

Hopefully not. You care about what has been said. Or you should.

That’s the standard we’ve lost. That’s what’s slipping away while people argue about sentence construction like it’s the defining moral issue of our time. That’s the challenge that we have in front of us, and that needs addressing.

We don’t do this in other fields. If a photographer uses editing software, no one cries about the tool. If a musician uses production effects, people still listen to the song. But in writing, we’ve convinced ourselves that the use of assistance somehow poisons the whole piece. Even if the writer did the work. Even if the piece is clear, thoughtful, and relevant.

The irony is brutal. We’ve reached a point where the same people who scream about AI’s lack of originality are producing content that is completely predictable. There is nothing original about these AI rants anymore. Nothing fresh. Just the same complaint, repackaged again and again. The worst part is that these posts crowd out work that actually tries to look deeper. Posts that explore difficult questions, challenge assumptions, or present uncomfortable perspectives. Those get ignored.

And the result is now that the people who are still trying to post well thought out articles, who try to ask the hard questions, who are wanting others to think and discuss important issues, are getting quieter. Not because they’ve run out of things to say, but because they’re tired of saying them into the void. And they’re tired of having to constantly edit their posts, and change how they would naturally write, so that people don’t accuse them of being AI. It wears you down when you care about saying something meaningful and nobody listens. It makes you second-guess whether the effort is worth it. Why keep investing time in something when most people would rather engage with a meme that blames AI for the decline of punctuation?

This whole attitude is simply not sustainable. If this continues, we’ll end up with a public space filled entirely with noise. The thoughtful voices will give up. The ones who take risks with ideas, who try to unsettle easy answers, will just leave the room. And we’ll be left with what? More posts about em dashes? More outrage at AI tools we barely understand? Oh, and maybe a few more people who are “proud and humbled” to receive some random award.

We need to stop. Now. Desperately. We need to stop rewarding the easy takes. We need to stop jumping to conclusions based solely on formatting. We need to stop pretending that spotting a punctuation mark is the same thing as analysis. We need to stop looking at paragraphs like this and saying, “no-one talks like that” “no one repeats a phrase so many times” etc. And yes, this was completely written by me, and not AI. Surprisingly, this is how I write!

If you want better content, start by reading better content. Stop scanning for sentence structures you don’t like. Stop obsessing over how something was written and start asking what it’s saying.

We need to get past the surface. We need to stop rewarding the most obvious, repetitive takes. We need to read. And I mean actually read. The whole piece. Not just the first line. Not just the bit that makes us feel clever, angry, or superior. The whole thing. We need to think harder about the ideas being offered, not just the formatting of the package they come in.

And when we finish reading, we need to ask better questions. Not “Was this written by AI?” but “Is the claim supported?” “Is this worth thinking about?” “What’s the argument here?” “Do I agree?” “If not, why not?” “Does it move the conversation forward?” Those are the questions that matter. Not whether an em dash was used. Not whether a phrase sounds like something you’ve seen before.

Because those are the questions that build conversations. Those are the questions that keep intellectual spaces alive. And right now, it feels like no one is asking them.

So please, stop. Read what’s actually there. And if it’s thoughtful, honest, maybe even a little messy, sit with it. Share it. Say something about it. Comment on the good posts, the thoughtful posts, the posts that have taken time and effort. The posts that are not trying to sell you something or give biased hype. Even if you have nothing to say, spare the time to give a like. That will encourage the posts to be promoted in the LinkedIn algorithm. And if you think it has value then share it with your networks. Repost.

I’m still writing. For now. I’m still trying. I’m still hoping that something gets through. But I won’t lie; it’s getting harder. I’m not the only one feeling it. And at some point, the whole thing may just become too hard for us to continue. And that would be a shame. There are people who post thoughtfully, who have valuable things to say, who are throwing out useful challenges. I would hate for their voices to be silenced.

As Dickens said, it really does feel like we’re living in the best of times and the worst of times. We have incredible tools that could help us think sharper, write clearer, and understand each other better, but too often they are wasted. Instead of building knowledge, we get caught up in distractions like endless debates over em dashes.

So please, think before you scroll past. Read before you judge. Engage before you dismiss.

That famous line, “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done,” comes from Sydney Carton’s final sacrifice in A Tale of Two Cities. Carton willingly gives his life to save Charles Darnay.

In today’s world, the careless, ill-considered critiques often overshadow the voices of authors who put in time and care. For true meaning to survive, those distracting, destructive voices must be sacrificed, allowing the deserving voices to flourish and live.

If we don’t make that sacrifice, if we keep rewarding noise and ignoring effort, we risk creating a world flooded with shallow content and lost ideas.

That would be a far, far worse thing than an em dash has ever done.