More Typos, Fewer Em Dashes: Writers Are Creating an Anti-AI ‘Literary Counterculture’

Last year, when the novelist Laura Brooke Robson began writing Love Is an Algorithm—a love story between the cofounder of an AI dating app and a musician trying to survive in the age of large language models—she took extra care not to sound like AI herself.

She wrote sentences she doubts she would have attempted before the advent of LLMs, avoiding what she calls “wishy-washy metaphors,” and took “a more winding path to avoid an em dash or a tripartite list.”

Since the widespread adoption of LLMs, Robson says her writing has fundamentally changed for the better, becoming a deliberate inverse of what she sees as AI’s default lack of style.

“I find myself writing less mechanically,” she says. “I have this urge to make little mistakes, like winks to the reader, to show that there’s a human behind the words. Like: What if I just invented a phrase? What if I did something unexpected with my punctuation?”

Robson is part of a larger cohort of writers who are practicing what could be called an anti-AI writing style. Across journalism, criticism, creative writing, and especially among compulsive LinkedIn posters, writers are converging on a set of choices that implicitly resist the trappings of AI-generated prose.

The style mostly takes shape through negation, often of the obvious AI tells, like lists of three, passive voice, not x but y, and em dashes. But it also prizes idiosyncrasy as its overriding principle, tapping into specific first-person anecdotes and eccentric similes that demonstrate the necessary drudgery of writing.

“I think AI could absolutely trigger a literary counterculture,” says Robson. “It seems to me that literary fiction will shift even further in the direction of the weird, the esoteric, while personalization takes hold of commercial fiction.”

Throughout the publishing world, allegations of AI have been troubling authors. In March, Hachette pulled Mia Ballard’s horror novel Shy Girl after speculation spread online that its writer had heavily utilized AI, a claim she rejected. Ballard, who says she has new writing forthcoming, has had to restrategize. “Having my writing feel more real and authentic is my number one priority,” she says, in addition to editing her own writing because she claims an editor she hired ran the book through AI software. “That is what bit me in the ass the first time.” Hachette did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Likewise, Steven Rosenbaum’s book The Future of Truth, an examination of “how AI transforms reality,” was purported to include multiple fabricated quotations generated by AI, which Rosenbaum later admitted was true.

Ellena Savage, an Australian novelist and academic whose prose tends towards complex-compound sentences inspired by Victorian literature, says she has “sadly been victimized by thoughts of chatbots.” “AI has stolen several syntactical conventions I once held dear. I miss over-deploying the em dash. I miss the rule of three, which was so satisfying. Now what—the rule of two? Five? Seven? 10?”

Across magazines and digital publications, this anti-AI counterstyle is reshaping in-house style and editorial practice too. Richard Fisher, an honorary professor at University College London and editor at online culture magazine Aeon, says AI has prompted him to encourage writers “to be more human” and write more conversationally. “We don’t want to sand out the rough edges, because AI cannot write prose as spiky or idiosyncratic as humans. Writers might not want to change their practice, but some might be forced into it.”

Mano Sundaresan became Pitchfork’s head of editorial content in July 2024, around the time LLMs became more mainstream. Coming from a blogging background, he encouraged writers “towards their own voice,” something he says, in hindsight, “could have also come from this AI turn.” He and his fellow editors have since sent writers a memo stating that no AI may be used when filing review copy, and encouraging first-person perspectives. (Pitchfork is owned by Condé Nast, which also owns WIRED.)