Some writers are deliberately making their prose more personal, irregular, and imperfect to avoid being mistaken for AI-generated text.
WIRED reports that novelists, journalists, and social-media writers are leaning into first-person narration, visible quirks, typos, and fewer machine-associated patterns such as overused punctuation. The behavior reflects a cultural side effect of generative AI: polished generic writing can now feel less trustworthy.
The change matters because AI detection is not only a technical question. Readers form judgments from style, voice, and context. If synthetic text makes neutral corporate prose feel suspicious, human writers may respond by making individuality more obvious.
That strategy has limits. A distinctive style can also be imitated, and messy writing is not proof of human authorship. Still, the trend shows how AI is reshaping norms around credibility. The new marker of professionalism may be less about smoothness and more about a recognizable human point of view.