Was this written by AI?

 

“No AI was in used this.”

Every time I see this, I think: okay… but is it any good?

It’s presented like a virtue. A signal: “This came from a real human, the old-fashioned way.”  I get it. It’s meant to signal something: purity, effort, humanity. Like buying bread from someone who insists it was made “the old way.” Which sounds nice, until you realize the old way also produced a lot of very bad bread.

“Human-made” has never been a quality guarantee. I’ve read plenty of human writing that felt like wading through wet cement. Being human is a good starting point, but it doesn't stand alone as a credential. 

Saying “no AI was used” is a bit like a chef bragging they didn’t use a recipe. That could mean mastery or it could explain why the soup is disappointing. The method isn’t the meal.

Lately, though, we’ve gotten fixated on the method. People scan paragraphs like they’re counterfeit bills, looking for tells. “Too many em-dashes.” “Too structured.” We’ve reached a point where writing clearly might get you accused of outsourcing your brain.

This argument isn’t really about tools … it’s about ownership. If something can help you think, shape an idea, sharpen a sentence… where do you end? That question makes people nervous. So we draw a line. “This side is me, that side is the machine,” and we stand there like we’ve secured something important.

But the "this is me" line was always a bit of a fiction.

Because none of us create in isolation. We’re not as original as we feel when we’re typing. We’re stitched together from things we’ve read, arguments we’ve had, phrases that stuck, ideas that rattled around long enough to feel like our own. We’ve been remixing other people’s thinking forever. The only difference is that it used to happen slowly enough to feel like invention instead of assembly.

That said, I don’t think the “No AI” crowd is entirely wrong. There is something real they’re trying to protect, even if the slogan is clumsy.

You can feel when a piece of writing has friction in it. Not bad friction, human friction. The kind that comes from someone actually wrestling with an idea instead of just arranging it neatly. A sentence that almost trips over itself because the thought behind it isn’t fully settled yet. A paragraph that reveals the writer changed their mind halfway through.

That stuff matters. It’s the difference between writing that’s merely correct and writing that feels lived-in.

None of that, however, is guaranteed by the absence of AI.

You can write something painfully hollow all by yourself. You can also use tools and still produce something sharp, strange, and unmistakably yours. The presence or absence of assistance doesn’t map neatly to depth, originality, or meaning. It’s just not that clean.

So when I see “no AI was used,” it feels less like a meaningful signal and more like a kind of virtue shorthand. A way of saying, “trust this,” without actually earning that trust on the page.

And readers, in my experience, are less interested in your process than you think. They’re not sitting there awarding points for purity. They’re asking much simpler, much harsher questions:

Is this worth my time?  

Does it say something I haven’t quite been able to articulate? 

Does it sharpen a blurry thought? 

Does it make me pause, or laugh, or argue back in my head?

If the answer is yes, nobody cares how you got there. If the answer is no, the fact that you suffered through every word unaided is admirable, I guess. But it doesn’t make the reading experience any better.

Slop is slop. Handcrafted slop is still slop.

Maybe the more interesting shift would be this: instead of obsessing over whether something used AI, we get better at noticing whether something actually thinks.

Because that’s the part that’s getting rarer. Not humanity (there’s plenty of that) but genuine, engaged thinking. The kind that doesn’t just glide from point A to point B but leaves a few scuff marks along the way.

Tools will come and go. People will keep drawing lines and defending them. That’s what we do when something new shows up and rearranges the furniture.

But I keep coming back to the same filter:

Not: “Who wrote this?”

Not: “How was this made?”

Just: Is it any good?

Everything else feels like reading the label instead of tasting the food.

Ready?

Writers, if you’re gonna hit SEND with deliverables, you’d better be ready to get hit back.

That’s the deal. You don’t get to bask in your own cleverness and then fall apart when someone red-pens your baby. Every headline, every tagline, every CTA is fair game for getting picked at. Questioned. Rewritten. Maybe even ripped to shreds.

And that’s not cruelty. That’s the job.

Be prepared to defend every decision you made, but don’t dodge critique ... sharpen your next draft with it. 

Every red mark is proof you’re in the arena, not watching from the stands

Piggly Wiggly

 

Every time I walk into a modern supermarket, I have the vague sensation that I’m participating in a very polite psychological experiment.

Soft lighting. Strategic fruit displays. Twelve brands of the same oat milk arranged like they’re auditioning for a minimalist design magazine. And somewhere, silently judging me, a row of protein bars that taste like sweetened drywall but promise health, energy, and, in some ways, moral superiority.

Hard to imagine, but before 1916, you couldn’t wander a grocery store making questionable life choices next to the frozen waffles. You walked in, handed a clerk your list, and waited while they retrieved your food like a polite, edible library system. Sometimes they suggested things. Sometimes they judged you. Mostly they controlled the flow of the entire experience.

That was shopping.

Then along came Clarence Saunders, a grocery wholesaler in Memphis who apparently woke up one morning and thought, ‘What if we just… let people touch things?’ A radical notion. Borderline chaos. The retail equivalent of letting toddlers run a city council meeting.

Everyone thought he was ridiculous. Competitors even ran ads mocking the idea, which is comforting in a bleak sort of way. History shows that whenever something genuinely new appears, the first public response is usually laughter followed by panic, like someone spotting a chimp on an airplane.

Saunders opened his store anyway and gave it the deeply unserious name Piggly Wiggly, which sounds less like a business and more like a children’s book character. When people asked why he chose the name, he basically said, “So you’d ask”. Which, honestly, is better branding logic than most million-dollar startups manage today.

But the name wasn’t the real disruption. The layout was.

Customers entered through a turnstile, grabbed a basket, walked down aisles, saw clearly marked prices, picked whatever they wanted, and paid at the front. No middleman, just you, your list, and your impulses.

It was the first self-service grocery store in America, and within a year, Saunders was franchising. By 1923, there were more than a thousand of them.

Which means one slightly stubborn man rearranged how an entire country bought food. Not with new technology. Not with an app. Just by removing a step everyone assumed was necessary.

That part fascinates me. Because we live in an age obsessed with adding things. More features. More layers. More dashboards explaining other dashboards.

Saunders did the opposite. He took something away. And in doing so, he quietly invented impulse buying … the economic engine of late capitalism and my personal weakness around dark chocolate covered almonds. When customers had to walk past every product, they didn’t just buy what they needed. They bought what looked good, what felt comforting, what whispered, “You deserve this,” in the gentle tone usually reserved for bad decisions.

He even put candy at checkout, which is either genius merchandising or the earliest documented form of emotional manipulation, depending on how recently you’ve tried to parent a six-year-old.

The wild part is that today we’d call this “behavioral design.” We’d build a conference around it. Someone would write a book with a bright orange cover and a subtitle containing the word habit.

But a century ago, it was just a guy rearranging shelves and trusting human nature to do the rest.

That’s the lesson hiding under the nostalgia and the oddly named store: real disruption isn’t always about inventing something new. Sometimes it’s about noticing the invisible friction everyone else politely ignores.

And friction is everywhere right now.

We’ve built digital lives filled with tiny clerks: algorithms suggesting what to watch, what to read, what to think, what to want. Helpful, efficient, and faintly suffocating. Like being wrapped in a very soft, very intelligent blanket you didn’t ask for.

Convenience, we’re told, is the highest good. Faster. Easier. Smoother.

But Saunders’ story makes me wonder if we’ve misunderstood the assignment. Because convenience isn’t just about removing effort. It’s about deciding which effort matters.

He removed the clerk, but he added wandering. He removed waiting, but he added choice. He removed control, and accidentally created temptation.

That trade-off feels more honest than most modern design, which tries to erase effort entirely, as if a meaningful life should feel like scrolling through a menu that never ends and never quite satisfies.

Maybe the real rebellion now isn’t building smarter systems. Maybe it’s noticing where the friction is doing something useful: The pause before buying. The silence before speaking. The boredom before an idea. All the uncomfortable little spaces where thinking actually happens.

AI "Tells"

With everybody lathered up over detecting indications that AI was used in everything posted or published, I'm considering adding a quick parenthetical aside every time I naturally use a phrase or punctuation that signals AI use. How does this sound?

The things that used to signal craft — clarity, rhythm, structure — things you’ve been doing for years get rebranded as artificial. (Damn,  I've used an em-dash, another AI "tell")