The internet’s drowning in a septic tank of A.I. generated horseshit.
Perfectly formatted. Perfectly vacuous. Reading it is like licking the inside of a corporate bathroom’s hand dryer.
The words look like words, sure. The sentences have subjects and predicates and all that grammatical foreplay, but they’re dead eyed mannequins wearing human skin suits. No pulse. No soul. Just the robot equivalent of a smile painted on a department store dummy whose eyes follow you around the abandoned mall.
You’ve felt it, right? That creeping sensation when you’re reading something that sounds like it was written by a chorus of marketing graduates being slowly digested in the belly of a silicon beast.
The way your eyes glaze over, your brain cells committing suicide one by one rather than process another “According to experts” or “In today’s fast-paced world.”
People are starving for words with fingerprints on them, you know? Actual human words.
Content that bleeds when you cut it. Sentences assembled by someone who occasionally stares into their refrigerator at midnight contemplating the existential dread of expired yogurt.
Write like you’ve got nightmares and dreams and that weird memory of your uncle’s basement that smells like wet cigarettes and regret.
Write like your keyboard is connected directly to the meat computer behind your eyeballs, not some cloud based suggestion engine that’s been fed a diet of LinkedIn motivational posts and corporate style guides.
(Did I tell you I don’t like LinkedIn before?)
Your readers can tell the difference. They might not say it, but they feel it in their gut.
That subtle wrongness when words have been sanitised of all humanity, like a hotel room that’s too clean and you just know someone died there.
So spill your guts onto the page. Let your sentences have nervous breakdowns. Occasionally go off on tangents about how pigeons might be judging your life choices. Be weird. Be human. Be the kind of writer that A.I. can only poorly imitate, like a child wearing their parent’s clothes and pretending to go to work.
At the end of the day, we’re all just electrified meat puppets trying to connect through strings of symbols before the universe pulls the plug and we all cease to exist. Might as well make those symbols taste like something other than corporate approved flavour packets.
Be your weird self. Sneak it into your writing and watch people look for more.
Stephen Walker