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

Writers including novelists, journalists, and others are intentionally incorporating unconventional writing styles, such as typos and fewer em dashes, along with first-person narratives and personal idiosyncrasies, to distinguish their work from AI-generated text. This emerging "literary counterculture" reflects concern among writers about being mistaken for chatbots as large language models become more prevalent. The movement represents an attempt to preserve distinctly human writing characteristics in an era when AI systems can produce text that resembles human output.