Why We’re All Writing Badly on Purpose Now

The quiet rebellion against AI that’s happening in your inbox, your texts, and your brain.

Photo by Vitali Adutskevich on Unsplash

As the bicycle became increasingly popular in the Victorian age, many doctors warned that women who rode them would get “bicycle face”, a permanent grin caused by the strain of pedalling. Some towns banned telephones because people wouldn’t talk in real life. Today, people are starting to write poorly because of AI tools like LLMs Claude, ChatGPT etc.). Why?

We humans have a rather long and peculiar history of resisting new and emerging technologies. In some of my recent research work for clients, I am starting to notice fascinating little ways we are resisting Artificial Intelligence tools, specifically LLMs (Large Language Models.)

While some will tell you that we can’t actually detect AI written content, I’d argue that we can to a degree. Although more research does need to be done on this. What I am seeing is weak signals in the noise of cultural resistance.

Humans are quite good at pattern recognition. We are also all inherently story tellers. It’s how we make sense of the world and can work as social units. From the hundreds of conversations I’ve analysed recently around LLMs, I’m noticing some consistent comments. The over-use of the em…