The Rise of Human Slop—Why I Refuse to Dumb Down My Writing to Prove I’m Human

I recently came across a piece of writing advice so profoundly unhinged that I had to rub my eyes to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating. Someone suggested that creators should start purposely leaving typos in their work to prove it wasn't written by AI.

Let that sink in.

In a desperate bid to fight off "AI slop," the grand solution is to give the world human slop instead. Make it make sense.

We have officially entered a strange, collective psychosis where the fear of an invisible machine is driving artists to actively mutilate their own craft. Just the other day, I was scrolling through Instagram and watched a writer confess that she had gone through her entire, hard-fought manuscript and systematically edited out every single one of her em-dashes. Why? Because some random internet checklist told her that em-dashes look "too much like AI."

The world has gone completely mad.

The AI Witch Hunt and the Dopamine Machine

Let’s be real about what is happening here: we are living in an era of digital witch hunts.

For a certain corner of the internet, hunting for non-existent AI crimes has become a brand-new obsession—a highly addictive dopamine machine. There is a specific subset of haters and sloppy thinkers out there who now automatically flag any piece of well-written, cleanly edited content as automated garbage.

If your grammar is flawless, it’s AI.

If your pacing is tight, it’s AI.

If you use a beautiful, rhythmic literary device like a tricolon (hendiatris), it’s AI.

The irony, of course, is that people completely forget how these machines were built in the first place. AI didn’t invent the em-dash. It didn't invent elegant sentence structures or the rule of three. It copied those rules from us. It scraped the work of brilliant, flesh-and-blood human authors who spent centuries mastering the cadence of the written word.

But trying to make the internet police happy is an absolute waste of your time and your talent. If you start intentionally pepperin' your articles with spelling mistakes to appease them, guess what? The witch-hunt folks will just accuse you of adding typos on purpose to make your AI story look human-written. You cannot win a game where the rules are entirely fabricated by corrupted, cynical personalities. And the worst of it is that writers can suffer the consequences even if there's no proof. If you love irony, that happens at a time when adult literacy and reading skills are declining at alarming levels.

Don't Let the Paranoia Change Your Voice

We live in an age where some people find it infinitely easier to tear others down rather than do the hard, grueling work of building themselves into better versions of themselves. I refuse to worry about them anymore, and you should too.

The moment you let the fear of an algorithm—or the fear of the people who hate the algorithm—change how you put words on a page, you’ve already lost.

• Keep your em-dashes. Paint your prose with them if that’s how your mind naturally moves.
• Lean into your poetic structures. Use repetition, rhythm, and style.
• Eliminate every single typo you can find. Strive for excellence. Polishing your work until it shines isn't "robotic"—it’s called having pride in your goddamn craft.

Write From the Places a Machine Can't Go

The ultimate defense against an automated world isn't writing worse; it’s writing with a depth that code cannot replicate.

Instead of policing your punctuation out of pure paranoia, look inward. Write from the heart. Share the messy, specific, deeply personal human experiences that a language model has no access to—the failures, the weird childhood core memories, the raw grief, and the stubborn hopes. AI can mimic the structure of a soul, but it doesn't have one.

Mitigate the influence of these cynical internet hall-monitors. Close the tabs, ignore the accusations, and live your creative life.

I’d rather be falsely accused of being a machine because my writing is sharp, clean, and intentional, than put my name on a piece of sloppy human garbage just to prove I have a pulse. Keep your standards high. The world has enough slop already.