Apparently, nowadays using em dashes and semicolons makes many condescending YouTubers assume the content is automatically AI-generated — I personally prefer the term LLM-generated because we’re not really there yet as far as real AI is concerned.
Of course, it would’ve been mind-blowing if I had access to LLMs 13 years ago back when my English teacher Mr. Feddal would lift my paper up in the air like that scene from the Lion King with Rafiki and baby Simba, and he would say, “Look at Mohamed’s writing! Not a single mistake [in sight]! Good job!” Mind you, he used to call me Mohamed even though my name’s actually Ahmed, and I never bothered to correct him, since both Ahmed and Mohamed have a very similar meaning — the most praised. Besides, he saw my name a million times while grading papers or checking attendance, so I figured if he wanted to call me by my actual name, he would’ve done so from the get-go. Coincidentally, his first name was Mohamed, too, so I chose to see it as a sign of respect, but I digress.
I’ve recently been accused by a few of my clients on Upwork — especially during the initial interview — of using ChatGPT to communicate. Obviously, because people thrive on negativity these days because it’s more profitable to talk about negative things, I can’t really expect people to assume that I’m just very good at English, so now it feels like mastering the English language is a fucking crime. Luckily though, I’m an unapologetic son of a gun, meaning I won’t just change my writing style, especially for the sake of pleasing almost-illiterate Americans who can’t even differentiate between it’s and its. Also, I don’t expect anyone to read anything I write or say, and it’s one of the reasons I stopped using social networks completely, while the main reason was the constant random shadow-banning even when I said something that was objectively and technically true and concise; like the time I said to a tech YouTuber who claimed that Python code couldn’t be compiled into an EXE that’s why many people on GitHub only share the source code, “Not really. You can use pyinstaller for that.” I didn’t know Nuitka at the time, which is yet another way to compile Python code into a standalone EXE. My reply kept getting filtered out no matter how many times I tried to censor any potential words while my original comment, and the tech YouTuber’s reply seemed fine. At the time, YouTube was the only social media platform I was still using, and so that incident was the last straw that broke the camel’s back.
A few years back, an award-winning female author once offered me a job to become her editor. While I was genuinely flattered and honored, I politely declined, of course, simply because I prefer making money from doing technical IT work. Thing is, I’ve always had this idea in my head that I’m highly susceptible to writer’s block, and if I’m being completely honest, it’s a fucking miracle that I’ve written all this with no help from any LLM of any kind; it really does feel like an accomplishment in this day and age where AI slop is rampant. Ironically, because I’m super lazy, I figured that I had to train my subconscious to always write stuff properly, so that I wouldn’t have to make a conscious effort whatsoever, and believe it or not, that shit worked like a charm!
Normally, whenever I was in ultra lazy mode, I would just send a long-ass prompt with bullet points to an LLM, and tell it to turn it into an SEO-optimized article, but lately, I just lost faith in LLMs and the concept of AI completely to the point where I’d rather be the guy that writes one genuine fucking blog post once in a fucking blue moon than post AI slop on a regular basis.
Generally speaking, ever since I was a kid, it always felt more satisfying to do things on my own without cheating or using training wheels; kind of like playing a video game in the highest difficulty, and finishing it or raising my hand in class only to answer questions that other classmates could not. Back in elementary school, when my French teacher gave all of us a few minutes to try and memorize words on the blackboard before closing it, I would intentionally look away because I was confident that I would ace the dictation exam, and I did every single time. It goes without saying that that kind of attitude pissed my classmates off more than it did my teachers to the point where they’d say shit like, “What’s that about you not studying at home at all? Yeah, right. You must have a shrine at home for worshiping books!” And of course, just like I enjoy solving difficult problems, finishing games in the highest difficulty, etc, I also see comments like that from my then-classmates as compliments of the highest order. It’s kind of similar to when someone says something like, “No way you did this yourself! You must’ve had help!” So to channel my inner Kanye here for a second, why would I feel insecure when someone doubts that I’m the best when I already know that I’m the fucking best? And like Jimmy Carr said, “They’re only jealous of what you got; they’re never jealous of how you got it.”
So yeah, while I enjoyed the crap out of writing all this, I really find it pathetic that some people try to associate certain writing patterns with LLM-generated content — free the em dashes and the semicolons for fuck’s sake! Unlike you pussies with your pathetic regurgitated alt-right-alt-left-appeasing opinions on an obsolete control freak of a platform, I can say whatever the fuck I want whenever the fuck I want, and that catharsis is worth more to me than any money you make from your AdSense earnings or your Super Chat or your pathetic little useless merch. Boom, bitches! Over 1,000 words!
