This is a guest post by my partner, Dave.
I ran across two examples today of people having to modify their behavior to avoid being mistaken for AI.
The first example is an article about students having to dumb down their work to pass AI detectors. From the article:
“The [student’s] assignment had been to write an essay about Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron—a story about a dystopian society that enforces ‘equality’ by handicapping anyone who excels—and the AI detection tool flagged the essay as ‘18% AI written.’ The culprit? Using the word ‘devoid.’ When the word was swapped out for ‘without,’ the score magically dropped to 0%.
The irony of being forced to dumb down an essay about a story warning against the forced suppression of excellence was not lost on me. Or on my kid, who spent a frustrating afternoon removing words and testing sentences one at a time, trying to figure out what invisible tripwire the algorithm had set. The lesson the kid absorbed was clear: write less creatively, use simpler vocabulary, and don’t sound too good, because sounding good is now suspicious.”
— Mike Masnick, “We’re Training Students To Write Worse To Prove They’re Not Robots, And It’s Pushing Them To Use More AI”, Techdirt, https://www.techdirt.com/2026/03/06/were-training-students-to-write-worse-to-prove-theyre-not-robots-and-its-pushing-them-to-use-more-ai/
I can relate. In technical writing and editing, I have reduced my use of em dashes—even when grammatically warranted—because they are popularly associated with AI writing.
The second example is a professional voice actor who narrates for the YouTube channel “Worst Cases.” One viewer commented that they had been avoiding the channel because the narration sounded AI generated. In response, the actor made a video proving that he is not an AI (see the video below).
It’s a weird world where we humans have to prove we are human.
The feature image for this post comes from an article, “Are We Dumb, Or Is the Internet Dead” on Pajiba.com. The article includes a nice little collection of delightfully awful AI-generated images.