By Imlisanen Jamir
There’s a new tic in how people write. They leave in typos, skip metaphors, avoid em dashes—not because they forgot, but because they’re scared. Not scared of editors or readers, but of being accused of writing like a machine.
I caught myself doing it. Staring at a typo in an email, I hesitated. Should I correct it? Or should I leave it there, like a smudge on purpose, proof that a human hand had touched the keys? That’s how far the paranoia has seeped in. A year ago, the thought would have been absurd. Today, it feels almost rational.
And it’s not just me. The suspicion is everywhere. A polished sentence online now looks suspicious, a well-turned metaphor feels fake, and if you “delve” into anything you might as well stamp it with “Generated by ChatGPT.” Em dashes have become contraband. Phrases like “it’s not just X, it’s Y” are filed under “AI tells.” Words like nestled, meticulous, boast—suddenly radioactive.
What this paranoia has created is a strange, self-inflicted censorship. People are sanding down their own voices, cutting out rhythm, vocabulary, and style, all in the name of proving they’re not machines. It’s a weird kind of reverse Turing Test where we volunteer to sound a little dumber, a little clumsier, just to pass.
The irony is obvious: the more we contort ourselves to appear “authentically human,” the more machine-like the writing becomes. Stripped of personality, it reads like something an algorithm would spit out after being told to “keep it natural.” Colorless, flat, deliberately mediocre.
It says something about our cultural neurosis that we now equate humanity with imperfection. As though the only way to prove we’re real is to misspell a word, botch our punctuation, or flatten a sentence into something uninspired. It’s a race to the bottom dressed up as authenticity.
And the machines aren’t even asking us to do this. This paranoia is entirely human. ChatGPT doesn’t care whether you use an em dash. Social media, on the other hand, does. The comments section is where the inquisition happens, where anything that looks “too polished” is condemned as synthetic. That pressure is what’s driving people to amputate their own style.
What gets lost in this mess is the simple point of writing: to communicate clearly, to make someone feel or think differently, maybe even to delight them along the way. Instead, we’re trapped in a strange performance, where the goal isn’t clarity or truth but plausible deniability. “Don’t worry; this clumsy sentence is definitely human.”
It leaves us with an open question: if we keep trimming away voice, nuance, and craft in fear of looking like AI, then what’s left? At some point, we might not need the machines to flatten our writing—we’ll have done the job ourselves.
Comments can be sent to imlisanenjamir@gmail.com
