You’re Writing Like a Bot and Everyone Knows It

You’ve seen it on LinkedIn. You’ve seen it in your inbox. That perfectly structured, aggressively bland prose that sounds like a corporate robot achieving sentience. You nod along, maybe even skim it, but you aren’t actually reading. You’re just waiting for the em-dash to appear.

Here’s the gut-punch you don’t want to hear: The real danger of AI isn’t that it makes you sound like a machine; it’s that it completely destroys your ability to realize you sound like one.

We like to think the problem with LLM-generated text is that it produces bad writing. It doesn’t. That’s the trap. ChatGPT produces highly fluent, grammatically impeccable, completely soulless drivel. And when you copy-paste that drivel and slap your name on it, you are walking around with your intellectual fly wide open.

You think you look smart. You think you’re coming across as authoritative. But to everyone else reading your work, you look ridiculous. The intellectual embarrassment is visible to everyone except the person displaying it.

Consider the em-dash. Once a beloved tool of actual writers, it has been so thoroughly hijacked by ChatGPT that seeing it now triggers an immediate visceral recoil. The irony? Even the people writing scathing critiques of AI-generated text are accidentally using the exact syntax patterns they’re mocking. The machine’s influence is so pervasive that no one is immune to self-blindness.

In a post-LLM world, fluent style is no longer evidence of thought. It’s evidence of a good prompt.

You might be thinking, ‘But my writing is good! I edit the output!’ No, it isn’t, and no, you don’t. If you are relying on an LLM to generate your prose, your ear for language has been quietly rotting. You’ve lost the ability to detect the plastic, synthetic rhythm of algorithmic text. You’ve stopped feeling the texture of your own words.

This isn’t about being a Luddite. This is about credibility. If you publish LLM-flavored text while claiming authorship, your readers are judging you. They are silently downgrading your intelligence. They are assuming you have nothing original to say, so you outsourced the saying of it.

Take a side. Commit. If you use AI to draft, own it. But if you want to be taken seriously as a thinker, a writer, or a professional, you must build an internal ‘fly check’ for your prose.

Stop assuming your readers are naive. They can smell the plastic in your prose, and they are silently editing their opinion of you.

The next time you hit publish on a perfectly balanced, three-point argument with a neat little summary at the end, ask yourself: Did I write this, or did a machine write me? Because the rest of us already know the answer.