I had a good streak going.
Every day for five weeks, I posted about a new AI “factor.”
The weird stuff.
The subtle stuff.
The things that break products and workflows in ways no one expects.
Until they do.
It started as a technical exercise.
Digging into the edge cases of AI.
But it was more than that…
A reflection on writing itself.
And sure enough.
The two collided.
Again.
AI is changing the meaning of authorship.
It’s changing how we perceive it.
You see it here on LinkedIn all the time.
Em dashes?
A telltale LLM tic.
Comment sections?
Filled with polite, empty gratitude.
And the platform itself?
The constant “Rewrite with AI” you never asked for.
The platform’s own ghostwriter.
Here to replace your voice.
But there’s something deeper happening.
The paragraph is disappearing.
We used to write to build ideas.
One paragraph leading to another.
Each adding weight.
Shaping nuance. Supporting subtlety.
An author’s voice shone in paragraph form.
Now?
Line breaks.
Punchy one-liners.
Broetry.
Not to make a point.
But to signal that a human wrote it.
The irony?
Even our writing about how AI is changing writing.
It now looks exactly like the thing we’re afraid of.
This line-break style isn’t for clarity anymore.
It’s a social signal.
A desperate flag waving in the feed: “A HUMAN WROTE THIS.”
We’ve traded substance for a signal.
And the ultimate irony?
I had to write this way for you to even read about it.