First of all, they criticize the use of an em-dash as em hyphen. Either they do not actually know the difference between a hyphen and an em-dash, or are attributing all hyphens being used as em-dashes as AI, which is not true. An Em-dash (— or dash the length of an M) is proper grammar and stylization, used in place of a comma. Since most people do not know how to make one offhandedly, lots and lots of fic writers use - as —, but lots of writers know how to make — ! It's two -- on lots of writing programs, or hold down - on a phone.
Use on an em-dash is common in fics just for pacing and writing style prefrances. Having commas all the time is bland. Having suddent thought switches with — is fast and changes the tone.
I also keep seeing people attributing things like sentance structure to AI. Using or not using proper grammar is not indicative of AI usage, nor is having a more varied vocabulary or anything, because AI *learns from us*. It's writing what people write, because is plagerizing.
I say this as someone who's full time job was reading and grading AI slop generation (the job started off as webpages and search rating, unfortunately large company who I cannot legally name got really into AI) so I think I have read more AI generated slop than the average bear.
You can't tell its creative writing apart from people with one easy trick, or one little tell, because EVERYTHING it generates is scraped from real human writing. So there will always be people who write like that. It also changes it's writing depending on what it's scraping. It will have mispellings and poor grammar if it is drawing from a source that has that, and if it's drawinf from published fiction, will be proper and written like an editor touched it, because its plagiarizing people.
You can start to suspect things like quick articles online are AI, with different tells, if you do nothing but read AI slop 8 hours a day. I can point out which listicles online have been touched by a human at least, and I can speculate with some accuracy if commercial content was AI written.
But even I, someone who has been forced to SCOUR AI slop as a day job, can not tell you this "one easy trick" for spotting AI content in writing. Because it is plagerism. Someone at some point did write those words, it's just mashing it together with other sentances and replacing what it recognizes as names and adjectives to match what it was going for.
The only tell I can think of that I don't see humans do much, but they absolutely can, is when it recognizes the places an adjective goes, sometimes it likes to put "it was ____ and ____." But can't actually recognize what should go there so will repeate the adj., like "it was sad and sad."
But, a human writer forgetting to go back and edit for an error also can do this. Don't harrass people for their fics. If you genuinely think it was written by AI, block them or ask them.
I detest generative AI. But I also detest people attacking real human beings who it is stealing from en masse over proper grammar and stylization. Do not chase the real human writers away from fic just because AI is scraping AO3 every 2 months.
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