AI is forcing autistic writers to censor themselves

Writing is more than putting a string of pretty-sounding words together. It's not about sounding smart; it's about using your imagination and intellect to connect with other people.

Did that sentence sound like AI? Thought so.

In a recent post, I originally opened with a similar sentence: "Writing what you know is more than creating self-insert characters," or something like that. But I couldn't shake the fact that my writing sounded like it was generated through a prompt, so I changed it.

LLMs train off of human writing, yes, but they can only do so much. Generative AI might never let you down in terms of grammar, but it doesn't actually understand the words it's regurgitating back to you. These models fall back on bullet points, flowery language, and "It's not X, it's Y" because those are the sentence structures it knows best. Articles they were trained on that used these structures got lots of updoots from wherever the developers plucked it from, so they're hoping it'll garner you plenty of updoots, too.

But I like my semicolons.

I've been a semicolon enjoyer for decades! I write with em dashes all the time!

People can't seem to make up their minds about whether AI is going to cannibalize, revolutionize, or simply end the internet as we know it. One of my content strategy clients leans into all three on any given day:

• Content strategy: Use AI for everything as much as possible!
• Content creation: Use AI, but take out all the semicolons and em dashes to hide it!
• Influencer marketing: Never, ever use AI. They need to know they're talking to a human!

According to Neuroqueer Heresies, building tangents into tangents into tangents is almost a telltale sign someone is neurodivergent. I noticed this back when I was in their Intro to Neurodiversity class; every assigned reading, even the books and articles I'd sought out myself, were filled with (interesting little asides tucked into parentheses), and sometimes — more often than not — pockets of unnecessary but interesting context next to dashes, semicolons, and footnotes.

We're certified yappers, for sure.

It almost feels like a cultural thing. That's why, as AI continues to leech its way into our lives and the rules continue to change, I want to resist the urge to shy away from my beloved tangents.

If most Americans couldn't tell a colon from a semicolon until ChatGPT taught it to them, that's not autists' problem, is it?