I’ve been using parallel structure in my writing — fiction and non — since college. To me it just looks better and reads better, and it’s more aesthetically pleasing. But one of the hallmarks of AI writing is the use of “thing, and thing2, and thing3”, with or without the commas and conjunctions. 

As I revise the BDSM romance book — up to chapter 14 of 23 — I’ve noticed my uses of parallel structure and the rule of threes more and more. I’m not the only writer who does this, and since AI models were trained on a whole lot of fiction it’s unsurprising that they would write creatively in this way. 

I just don’t want anyone thinking I used AI when I didn’t. Of course, if that means dumping my use of parallel structure, then I’ll just have to risk it. After all, the first paragraph of Chapter 5 of Frankenstein was written by AI, according to a popular AI checker; if you put my books into an AI checker and it says they were written by AI… Well… Then I guess the checker is wrong. 

I haven’t stopped using em-dashes (although I do use them less when people stop talking abruptly, instead using ellipses and people trailing off). I’m certainly not going to stop writing with parallel structure. And I’m definitely not going to stop writing absurdly-long sentences and using punctuation to control the pacing. I will change the names I use to make them less likely to pop in someone’s mind as being AI-generated, but that’s about as far as I’ll go.