I’m teaching a technical writing course at the local community college this quarter. Recently, I asked my students a simple question: What screams AI wrote this? The results were both predictable and fascinating.
Students rattled off the usual constellation of tells. Formulaic structure. Prefabricated phrases. Excessive em dash usage. Metronomic rhythm. Too many emojis. An unnervingly chipper tone. It’s just too perfect and polished.
One student went further. It’s not just stylistic clues but the larger gestalt machine-authored text produces. There’s this uncanny valley vibe, he said, like a robot imitating human speech.
You know the feeling. Everything sounds right, but something’s off. The eerie encounter with writing that mimics all the surface features of communication but emits no cognitive heat signature. No one’s home. Just the unsettling hum of statistical prediction.
We used to read to connect. Now we read to detect. This is the shift. The subtextual murmur beneath what used to be a casual morning scroll. Did a human write this? Or was it conjured by a large language model trained on almost everything ever said?
Much of daily reading now resembles a lowkey Turing Test. The ambient, involuntary kind running silently in your head, scattered across inboxes, feeds, websites, threads, and chats. The email from your boss (too formulaic). A friend’s text (too coherent). A LinkedIn post (too inspirational). A Reddit comment (too even-tempered for Reddit). Each arriving wrapped in the same question: Who, or what, made this?
Reading, in other words, is no longer an act of immersion but of interrogation, and the old pleasures of interpretation have been overwritten by a new obligation concerned less with meaning and more with origin. Call it Real-Time Forensic Authorship Analysis, a chore quietly offloaded onto the reader by the ontological crisis language models have unleashed.
You can’t lose yourself in a text if you’re simultaneously scanning it for tells or wondering if a machine produced it. It’s the difference between listening to music and analyzing a waveform. The spell breaks. You float slightly above the words, monitoring your own response, losing the ability to read the way you used to when you knew someone was on the other end.
The old contract, after all, assumed someone was behind every word. A consciousness that made choices, even if sloppily or self-indulgent. Even ghostwritten memoirs had a ghost. That presence, however refracted, was the bedrock of reading itself.
Now it’s speculative. Novelists. Journalists. Influencers. Nobel Laureates. Teachers. Students. Teenagers crafting a breakup text. Everyone’s using AI, a little or a lot. It haunts everything. Barthes declared the death of the author in 1967. AI just made it literal, scalable, and obscenely profitable. NVIDIA, at last glance, is worth $5 trillion, making the chips that automate writing; killing the author, it turns out, is one of the most lucrative business models in history.
This ambient suspicion produces a bizarre inversion, too. The smoother the writing, the more suspect it becomes. Craft itself can start to backfire. A clean sentence. A satisfying cadence. Meticulous arrangement. The judicious em dash. All of it now risks sounding like machine polish. Excellence, strangely, is no longer proof-of-life.
So, is weirder, messier writing the only way to prove you’re human? Do you find yourself removing em dashes or sanding down the edges of your phrasing like distressed furniture? Will a new aesthetic arise that favors imperfection? Will cracks in the structure come to inspire trust?
How do you know I’m real? Any forensic alerts going off in your head? Maybe this essay was generated by the very thing it’s describing: a model trained to sound like a paranoid English major with a taste for obfuscation. Is there a sufficient level of imperfection in this essay to convince you a person was here?
And so we read. Closely. Suspiciously. Searching for sparks of connection. For the weird sentence. The risky metaphor. The comma splice that feels like a heartbeat. The thing that doesn’t belong, but insists on being said.
Maybe that’s the last trace of the human. Not coherence, but contradiction.
