Content note: nothing in this piece is a prank or jumpscare where I smirkingly reveal you've been reading AI prose all along.

It's easy to forget this in roarin’ 2026, but homo sapiens are the original vibers. Long before we adapt our behaviors or formal heuristics, human beings can sniff out something sus. And to most human beings, AI prose is something sus.

If you use AI to write something, people will know. Not everyone, but the people paying attention, who aren’t newcomers or distracted or intoxicated. And most of those people will judge you.

The Reasons

People may just be squicked out by AI, or lossily compress AI with crypto and assume you’re a “tech bro,” or think only uncreative idiots use AI at all. These are bad objections, and I don’t endorse them. But when I catch a whiff of LLM smell, I stop reading. I stop reading much faster than if I saw typos, or broken English, or disliked ideology. There are two reasons.

First, human writing is evidence of human thinking. If you try writing something you don’t understand well, it becomes immediately apparent; you end up writing a mess, and it stays a mess [...]

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Outline:

(00:47) The Reasons

(03:39) Luddite! Moralizer!

The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.