Authors Are Doing Stupid Things To Prove They Didn’t Use AI

I’ve recently started noticing a disturbing trend that would’ve sounded completely nuts just a couple of years ago. Writers are actively admitting they’re deliberately leaving typos, awkward sentences, or obvious mistakes in their articles because they’re worried sounding too polished will make people think they used AI. Some even say they stop themselves fixing paragraphs they know they could improve, just in case the finished version looks “too perfect.”

Just the other morning, I stumbled across one of those discussions in the comments section of an article. One writer suggested leaving a couple of spelling mistakes in every sentence. Another recommended avoiding smooth transitions because they “feel too ChatGPTish.” A third argued that if a draft reads too cleanly, the writer has probably edited it too much.

I still can’t quite believe we’ve ended up here because writers have rewritten weak sentences, cut unnecessary words, smoothed rough transitions, and fixed mistakes before anyone else saw them.

Imagine explaining to an editor of writing tutor twenty years ago that you deliberately left a few spelling mistakes because the corrected version looked “too polished.” They’d probably assume you were joking, or “taking the mickey” as we say in Scotland.

But somehow, the conversation about sacrificing quality to prove authenticity actually exists now… and people are having it with completely straight faces.

For hundreds of years, if someone wanted a realistic image of themselves, they needed a painter. A portrait could take weeks or months to complete, and the quality of the final result depended on the artist’s skill, patience, and ability to capture the person sitting in front of them.

Then photography arrived.

Suddenly, a camera could create a detailed image of someone’s face in a fraction of the time. Newspapers and critics started asking what would happen to portrait painting. If a machine could produce a more accurate likeness faster and cheaper, what reason did anyone have to pay someone to paint one?

And honestly, it’s hard to argue with that question.

If you were a portrait painter watching this happen in the 1800s, you probably wondered whether your entire profession was about to disappear. You had spent years learning how to create realistic images, and then a new invention arrived that could do that one specific task better than you could.

Some painters stopped working in portraiture altogether. Others kept painting and started exploring different ways to use the medium. A few generations later, the idea that photography replaced painting sounds strange. People still buy paintings. Museums are still filled with portraits, landscapes, and abstract works. Artists still spend enormous amounts of time creating pieces that have value because of the person who made them.

The camera solved one problem.

Painting continued solving another.

I keep thinking about that because every time a new technology appears, people immediately start asking whether the old skill has become useless. But often, the better question is what people were actually trying to do in the first place.

Let’s run a little thought experiment together.

Imagine enough writers actually start following this stupid advice to make their writing worse. Now switch places and pretend you’re a reader looking for the best explanation of a topic on Google. Two articles appear in your search results. One is clean, well edited, and easy to follow. The other has distracting mistakes, clunky sentences, and rough transitions the author deliberately chose not to fix.

A writer can spend an hour making a paragraph clearer, tighter, and easier to read, look at the finished version, and think, “I’d better make this slightly worse or somebody’s going to accuse me of using ChatGPT.”

Think about how insane that is.

For centuries, polished prose was the goal. Writers chased the perfect sentence, editors spent their careers cutting unnecessary words, and publishers rejected manuscripts because paragraphs weren’t strong enough. People dedicated entire lifetimes to making written communication better.

Now we’ve created a situation where a writer can produce a clear, well-edited article and immediately wonder whether they should mess it up before publishing. Maybe add a typo. Maybe leave the clunky sentence. Maybe keep the paragraph that clearly needed another rewrite. After all, nothing says “human creativity” quite like intentionally publishing work you know is poorly written. And then writers bicker on social media, wondering why millions of people think AI can write better than people.

Geez… of course they do.

They’re comparing AI’s cleanest work against human writing that was deliberately made worse to survive the latest AI witch hunt. Readers never see the cleaner draft and they never know the awkward paragraph was a choice. Instead, they just keep reading article after article until polished writing starts feeling like something AI does and poor-quality and typo-ridden writing starts feeling like something people do all the damn time.

So let me ask you this…

What exactly did we think was going to happen?

We’ve spent centuries telling writers to polish their work. But now, because of AI witch hunts by people who have no idea what they’re talking about, we’re teaching them to hide the polish. Then, we’ll wonder why the public starts associating clarity, precision, and polished prose with AI instead of the species that invented all three.

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