Someone called me a bot last week and I sat with it longer than I want to admit.
It was a comment in one of the groups. A guy asked a real question. Something about moving money between two countries without losing a piece of it to fees every time. I know that one. I have lost that piece many times, at many bad counters, in many wrong lines. So I wrote him a proper answer. A few paragraphs. The banks I have used. The one trick that still works. The thing about timing that nobody tells you.
I hit post. I felt useful for about a second.
The first reply was not from him. It was from a stranger. Three words. "AI slop. Reported."
I read it twice. Then I did the stupid thing and went looking for what gave me away.
It was not the content. The content was true and it was mine and it came from years of standing at the wrong window with the wrong paperwork. It was the shape of it. Full sentences. A comma where a comma goes. A dash dropped into the middle of a thought. At the end I asked the guy a follow-up question, because I actually wanted to know the answer.
That was the crime. I wrote it with care. And careful, now, reads as fake.
It took me a while to see how we got here.
For years the fake writing was easy to catch because it was bad. Empty. All words and no person behind them. You could feel the nobody in it.
Then the tools got good. The fake writing turned smooth and polite and correct. So people flipped the test. Smooth became the enemy. Clean punctuation became a warning sign. A full paragraph that stayed on the point started to look like a machine wearing a person suit.
Which leaves you one way to prove you are human. Write badly on purpose.
I have watched people do it. Real people. They drop the capital letters. They leave the typo in. They add a small insult so it has a pulse. no full stop, a bit of attitude, that reads alive now. The careful paragraph reads like a script, and the warmth in it is the part that gets you reported.
I am not going to pretend I never touch these tools. I use them. They sit on my screen most days and they pay part of what I live on. I have said that before and I will say it to anyone who asks. That is not the argument.
The argument is what the suspicion does to a room full of people who are mostly real.
A lot of my contact with other humans happens through a screen. The groups. The comments. The messages at midnight when this city is asleep and the client in New York is awake. For a long time that was enough of a rope to hold. You typed to a stranger, you assumed a person was on the other end, and often enough a real thing passed between you.
Years ago, before any of this, I met a man through a forum. One of the old ugly ones, grey layout, no photos. He was in Da Nang and I was somewhere worse, and we argued for a week about visas, and then he told me which guesthouse to avoid and which woman sold the good bread near the market. We never met in person. I do not know his real name. Last I heard he had gone home to look after his mother, and then the forum died and I lost the thread and never found out if he came back out.
That was a stranger on a screen. It was also one of the realest things that happened to me that year.
You could not do that now. Not because the man is gone. Because the first reply would be three words, and one of us would have been reported before the bread ever came up.
That assumption is gone. The default flipped while I was not looking. Now everyone is a machine until they prove they are not, and the proof is being rude, or being sloppy, or being angry.
I think about the guy with the money question. He never got a clean answer. The one careful reply in his thread came with a red stamp across it that told him not to trust it. He is probably still paying the fees. Somewhere a real person needed a real thing, and the real thing arrived, and got thrown out for looking too good.
Here is what the machine does not need to do. It does not need to replace you. That is the loud fear and I think it is the wrong one.
It only needs to make everyone doubt everyone. It has already done that. It poured so much smooth fake writing into the water that we stopped trusting the taste of anything clean. So we suspect each other by default now, and we make ourselves smaller and worse to pass a test that cannot be passed, because the machine sits the same test and often scores better than we do.
The loudest hunters are the tell. The account that types "AI slop" under every careful post. Same three words. Every thread. All day. That is a script running. They think they are hunting machines. They became one.
I am not going to learn to write worse to prove I am alive. I am too old for it and it is too stupid a thing to spend a life on.
So I still write full sentences to strangers who might be nobody. Some of them are. Some of them report me. And every so often one of them writes back like a person, slow and specific and a little unsure, and it is worth the whole mess.
That is where it sits now. You say something real into a room that has decided you are fake, and you wait to see who answers like they are real too.
Most of them do not.
A few of them do. Those few are the only reason I keep the tab open.
Andrew - No Refunds •••