Sep 3, 2026 · 59 min · 9 segments
Deleting your em dashes isn't enough. Internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch on the hidden force driving the anti-AI writing revolution, and what it actually takes to sound nothing like a machine…
Gretchen McCullochGuest
Joe LazorHost
Shane is off this week planning the next steps in his entertainment empire across his Broadway producing and his TV shows.
So I've been fascinated the last couple of weeks by this story that came out in Wired.
about how writers are changing the way that they write in response to AI and almost coining this new literary style to sound nothing like AI.
Because it's something I found myself doing in my own writing, and Shane has too, where I am pushing myself to be more unexpected in everything I write, to have it sound like Something that AI can never, ever think of.
Also pulling from my own lived experience as much as possible to stand out from AI.
While you can pry my beloved em dash from my cold, dead hands, I probably have used it a tiny bit less, but more than that, because honestly, I think only idiots think that the em dash is a sign of AI writing.
The It's not X, it's Y, parallelism, use of words like delve, landscape, a rich tapestry, right? Those dead behind the eyes, chat GPT writing tics that are pretty easy to strip out of your writing.
At the same time, I know a lot of writers are really mad about the idea that we even should have to change the way that we write.
these ai companies openai anthropic google they just went out there and they scraped all of our writings they stole it without permission they scraped our books and they used to train their models and now their models sound like the way that we used to write so why should we change the way that we write in response to them it's hard to unpuzzle is this just a natural evolution we're constantly changing our language into response to where it came before modernism emerged as a response to romanticism even in modern online writing.
We see younger generations ditch slang once it becomes cringe and elder generations adopt it.
So is that just a natural evolution of online writing and the way that we speak and communicate online? I really wanted to dive into this question and To answer it, I brought on a very special guest.
So I just finished talking with Gretchen McCulloch, who is the world's foremost internet linguist.
That's about the way that we write and speak online and how it has actually created kind of this revolution in writing.
She makes the case that the internet has actually been a much more positive force on writing than most people think that came out in 2019.
So I wanted to catch up with her to get her take on what's happening today about how the way that AI is changing the way that we write and talk online and what it means for the future of writing.
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Shane is off this week planning the next steps in his entertainment empire across his Broadway producing and his TV shows.
So I've been fascinated the last couple of weeks by this story that came out in Wired.
about how writers are changing the way that they write in response to AI and almost coining this new literary style to sound nothing like AI.
Because it's something I found myself doing in my own writing, and Shane has too, where I am pushing myself to be more unexpected in everything I write, to have it sound like Something that AI can never, ever think of.
Also pulling from my own lived experience as much as possible to stand out from AI.
While you can pry my beloved em dash from my cold, dead hands, I probably have used it a tiny bit less, but more than that, because honestly, I think only idiots think that the em dash is a sign of AI writing.
The It's not X, it's Y, parallelism, use of words like delve, landscape, a rich tapestry, right? Those dead behind the eyes, chat GPT writing tics that are pretty easy to strip out of your writing.
At the same time, I know a lot of writers are really mad about the idea that we even should have to change the way that we write.
these ai companies openai anthropic google they just went out there and they scraped all of our writings they stole it without permission they scraped our books and they used to train their models and now their models sound like the way that we used to write so why should we change the way that we write in response to them it's hard to unpuzzle is this just a natural evolution we're constantly changing our language into response to where it came before modernism emerged as a response to romanticism even in modern online writing.
We see younger generations ditch slang once it becomes cringe and elder generations adopt it.
So is that just a natural evolution of online writing and the way that we speak and communicate online? I really wanted to dive into this question and To answer it, I brought on a very special guest.
So I just finished talking with Gretchen McCulloch, who is the world's foremost internet linguist.
That's about the way that we write and speak online and how it has actually created kind of this revolution in writing.
She makes the case that the internet has actually been a much more positive force on writing than most people think that came out in 2019.
So I wanted to catch up with her to get her take on what's happening today about how the way that AI is changing the way that we write and talk online and what it means for the future of writing.