AI & Anti-Intellectualism

I love em dashes. I always have. They let me think on the page the way I actually think—interrupting myself, circling back, correcting mid-stream. Lately, though, I find myself tempted to delete them, not because I’ve stopped liking them, but because I don’t want my writing to be mistaken for something machine-generated, which is, as they say on Resident Alien, “some bullshit.”

The em dash isn’t decoration. It’s epistemological. It marks thinking in motion. It shows revision happening in real time. That a machine can now simulate this gesture doesn’t invalidate the gesture itself. It only tells us that the model was trained on human writers who think this way. Confusing imitation with origin is a basic logical fallacy. Just because something can be copied doesn’t mean the original suddenly stopped being real.

Still, here I am, second-guessing my punctuation like a criminal wiping fingerprints. Not because I believe in the test, but because I understand how power works. Suspicion doesn’t have to be correct to be effective. It just has to be ambient. In that sense, AI detection functions less like scholarship and more like surveillance: probabilistic, opaque, and structurally indifferent to false positives. A lot of modern “detection” technologies don’t understand people—they sort, guess, and flag them, and they don’t care much about who gets caught in the net by mistake.

This is where the problem stops being technical and starts being cultural. This AI paranoia isn’t neutral. It’s actively anti-complexity, which in turn leads to anti-intellectualism. Once suspicion poisons reading, any writing that demonstrates fluency, compression, abstraction, or conceptual coherence starts to look suspect. If the prose is too clean, too fast, too controlled, the question is no longer what is being argued but who—or what—authored it. That isn’t literacy. It’s epistemic fear dressed up as rigor.

The moment “sounding human” becomes something writers feel they have to perform, writing itself begins to degrade. Clarity becomes suspicious. Mastery becomes implausible. Mediocrity becomes camouflage. This isn’t a side effect. It’s the logical outcome. The result is a quiet inversion of intellectual values. We reward the underdeveloped thought because it looks authentic. We punish the finished one because it looks optimized. The wow-level sentence—the one that turns an idea cleanly and lands with force—doesn’t get admired anymore. It gets audited. Excellence now has to justify itself against an algorithmic vibe check.

That’s a travesty. Not a melodramatic one, but a cultural one. A slow lowering of the ceiling under the guise of ethics. Scholars of anti-intellectualism have long noted that suspicion of expertise often masquerades as common sense or moral vigilance—just look at how medical expertise was treated during COVID. AI paranoia is simply the latest delivery mechanism. When excellence triggers suspicion, our culture enforces mediocrity as moral safety.

This is where it gets personal. Because of my dyslexia, verbal language has always been difficult for me. Speech is slow. It collapses under the pressure of my tangled, ball-of-yarn mind and disappears before I can unravel it. Written language doesn’t disappear. Written language is spatial and visual. It stays where I put it. I can see it, move it, re-enter it. Writing isn’t a translation of my thinking. It is my thinking. Outside of my brain, it’s my primary cognitive environment.

That isn’t just a feeling. It tracks with decades of research on dyslexia and neurodivergent cognition. Many dyslexic writers become unusually fluent on the page because we have to. We compensate—visually, structurally, through relentless revision—rather than relying on clean, real-time speech. (I continue to revise this article every time I read it.) We also tend to write outside the box, which can ironically read as non-human. So what looks like polish or an uncanny gestalt is usually adaptation. And guess which group scores the highest on AI detection false positives? We, the profoundly neurodivergent.

So that brings us back to my love of the em dash. I now I find myself questioning my own book reviews, my own essays, my own sentences—not because I think they’re wrong, but because they might sound too right. Because they’re sharp. Because they’re controlled. Because of decades of practiced draft and revision.

And honestly? Fuck that.

Not fuck the careful reader. Fuck the atmosphere. Fuck the culture of suspicion that mistakes intelligence for automation and fluency for fraud. If my writing makes someone uncomfortable, they are free to read somewhere else. I’m not going to dull my knives to prove they’re hand-forged. I’m not going to dumb myself down into authenticity. I’m not going to sabotage my own cognition so someone else can feel secure about authorship.

My writing isn’t artificial. It’s practiced. It’s adaptive. It’s earned. It’s mine.

If that level of human intelligence now seems implausible—that isn’t an argument against my work. It’s an indictment of how thoroughly we're being trained to distrust intellect, and of how little we think of ourselves.