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Human Made

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This week's cartoon goes out to my friend Ann Handley, who has been putting up a valiant defense for the em dash (—).

As Ann put it recently:

"People are patrolling the streets, rounding up em dashes like it’s CSI: Grammar Unit.

"Use one in a paragraph? That means you’re secretly AI! You’re generating your LinkedIn posts with a boiling cauldron of vibes and predictive text! You’re a fake! A phony! Cue the pitchforks! Light the torches! The mob is lurching toward you!

"Meanwhile, the rest of us are just out here trying to write like actual humans—messy, rhythmic, gloriously imperfect.

"I just used an em dash in that last sentence, see? Like humans do."

The Em Dash is just the tip of the spear for AI detection vigilanteism. In just the last few weeks, Hachette pulled a novel and The Atlantic called out a NYT column for tripping AI detection sensors.

The AI slop floodgates are wide open and the AI backlash is simultaneously underway. And as AI tools are more widely used, we're in a murky period as a culture of figuring out where to draw the line and what to disclose.

The BBC recently counted 8 different initiatives to come up with an "AI-free," modeled on the "Fair Trade" endorsement used for products. Claims like "Proudly Human", "Human-made", '"No A.I" and "AI-free" are popping up everywhere from films to books to marketing.

And yet, there's no full agreement on how even to define "human made."

As AI Research Scientist Sasha Luccioni put it:

"AI is now so ubiquitous and so integrated into different platforms and services, that it's truly complicated to establish what 'AI free' means. From a technical perspective, it's hard to implement. I think that AI is a spectrum, and we need more comprehensive certification systems, rather than a binary with AI/AI-free approach."

In the meantime, it will likely be a bumpy ride.

Keynotes

I’d headed to Houston, Texas this week to speak at Dot Innovations 2026. I hope to see some of you there!

As always, please let me know if you’d like to talk about any events you’re planning (or know of) that you think could be a good fit for some cartoon levity and insight.

For an idea of my approach to keynotes, here’s a full 30-minute keynote from one of my favorite events last year — Opticon 2025 hosted by Optimizely:

Cartoon From The Archives

Here’s a kinda sorta related cartoon I drew in 2017. And here’s where you can read and search all 24 years of these cartoons.

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Thank you for all of your support (and cartoon material)!

-Tom

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About Marketoonist

Marketoonist is the thought bubble of me, Tom Fishburne. I first started drawing cartoons as a student in the Harvard Business School newspaper (not quite as well-known for humor as the Lampoon) and later started this newsletter from a General Mills cubicle in 2002. The cartoons have followed my career ever since. I poke fun at the ever-changing world of marketing and business because I believe that laughing at ourselves can help us do our best work.