AI and the em-dash

AI is changing how we write. But all this has happened before, and it will happen again.

From the article:
“I’ve even heard of people deliberately leaving typos in their work, because mistakes are now apparently proof of hand-crafted artisanal prose.”

In what ways are you self-editing now that you perhaps weren’t before?

(Also, please keep this typo thing in mind as you read any of my books. Self-published without a net: true hand-crafted artisanal prose.)

Uncanny

This was a bit of an eye-opener. We’ve been sorting through old boxes recently, and I came across a bunch of printouts of software I wrote during my undergrad degree (because that’s what we did in those days: print out our work). I pulled out the thickest, opened it randomly, and snapped this pic.

An old dot-matrix printout of some sort of computer code

It’s cryptic, to say the least. What language is that? What does it do? What is the larger program’s intent?

Then I Lensed it with the Summarize option. The response came back in milliseconds, the snap of a finger.

A screenshot of a Google AI Overview that neatly summarizes the code in the previous image

That’s exactly what it was. The program was a graph construction and traversal cost package I’d written in Pascal 8000 for CS460, Data Structures, in 1986.

All that from a pic of a small section of obscure code.

Milliseconds.