There’s a new kind of attention that doesn’t read for meaning. It reads for origin. It scans a sentence not to understand what it’s doing, or where it’s going, but to decide where it came from.
Was this written by a person. Was it written by a machine. Was it touched by a machine.
That’s the new game, the new etiquette.
A kind of moral anthropology conducted one paragraph at a time. The goal isn’t to follow an argument or inhabit a voice. The goal is to detect a vibe. And the vibe in question is smoothness. Slight predictability. A certain breathless correctness that settles in the prose like dust: that’s the tell.
People say it with pride now:
“I can tell.”
As if that’s the point. As if writing is a purity test and they’re the designated inspectors. As if the most important thing you can say about a piece of work is that it came too easily.
What they’re reacting to isn’t harm. It’s ease.
(The strangest part is how loud they are about it. These self-appointed arbiters of authorship have 1,000+ subscribers and seemingly nothing to say, unless it’s a warning. But not about meaning, about method. As if the biggest threat to language is someone using a tool. Not someone wasting your time.)
They want to feel the strain. The sweat. The hesitation. They want the writing to bruise a little, just enough to confirm its humanity.
Somehow, this became a standard. Not quality. Not voice. Not depth. Just the absence of friction.
This gets stranger when you think about where most of this writing lives. Here on Medium, for example, when you’re starting out, everyone is almost anonymous. Not literally. There are names and bios and profile pictures.
But the voice? That takes time to know.
You read a few pieces, you start to feel for someone’s style, their favored topic areas, the rhythms they tend to prefer, the way they open a sentence or land a turn. Then one day they try something else. Something sharper, or looser, or strange. And you think:
“Oh, nice. They’re branching out.”
But the new gatekeepers don’t think that. They don’t pause. They don’t wonder.
The first instinct is diagnosis: Deviation is a symptom. Change is flagged. The quickest explanation wins:
Must be AI.
All of this is odd, because bad writing has always been smooth. Not in a crafted way. In a slippery, unfinished way. Sentences that go nowhere but follow the rules. Thoughts without weight, repeated for rhythm. This was a problem before the machines.
Now we’ve decided to rename the problem. Call it AI.
And once we do that, we no longer have to read. We can just detect. We can sniff the air and say,
“That’s not real,”
without saying what would have made it real.
I read things all the time that either bore me, confuse me, or leave no trace. Sometimes they’re human. Sometimes they’re not. I don’t care. I care whether they hold. Whether they move. Whether someone made something happen.
Everything else is ritual. A soft performance of discernment. A purity game dressed up as critique.
I don’t want to be good at telling.
I want to be changed by what I read.
[TL;DR] -> Shitty prose is shitty prose. Doesn’t matter if it’s a bot, a BFA, or one of the infinite monkeys finally making quota.