Style Meets the Algorithm

I’ve got a habit. 

Not a dangerous one (no one’s staging interventions), but a stylistic tic … a little rhetorical pivot that walks in one direction, stops, and then sharply turns on its heel. You know, the tried and true: "Not this. That." Such as "That’s not about success. That’s about keeping up appearances."

I call it “the correction.” Professors call it “contrast negation.” Whatever it's proper name is, I’ve always liked how it landed. It’s clean. It snaps. It gives a piece a kind of rhythm and makes a point without having to raise its voice. For years, I've used it the way I use garlic: generously, and probably more often than necessary.

Lately, though, I’ve been told this little move of mine is ]]dramatic pause[[ suspicious.

Apparently, if you see a line like “That’s not about winning. That’s about not losing,” you’re supposed to squint at it like a detective in a low-budget crime show and mutter, “AI wrote this.”

Which is funny, because I can dig up blog posts I wrote five or six years ago (back when AI was still mostly a sci-fi punchline) and there it is: “That’s not about confidence. That’s about fear wearing better clothes.” Right there in black and white, no algorithm in sight.

So I guess I have two explanations to chose from: Either I was secretly channeling the future like some kind of accidental oracle, or (and this feels slightly more plausible) AI learned that move from writers like me who were already using it.

But we’ve decided, collectively, that the fingerprint belongs to the machine, not the human who taught it how to hold the pen. So, we’re starting to treat patterns like they’re crimes. As if any repeatable rhythm in language must have been mass-produced in a server farm somewhere. It’s like accusing a pianist of cheating because they used the same chord progression twice. No, that’s not automation. That’s style. (Oooops! There I go again.)

Or maybe it’s just habit. Writers, like everyone else, fall into grooves. We find shapes that work and we reuse them. Not because we’re lazy, but because language is a tool and when you find a grip that fits your hand, you don’t immediately throw it away just to prove you’re original.

What’s strange is how quickly we’ve flipped the script. The things that used to signal craft — clarity, rhythm, structure — things you’ve been doing for years get rebranded as artificial. (Damn, now I've used an em-dash, another AI "tell")

There’s something mildly absurd about being told your natural writing voice now sounds like a bot, as if you’ve been unknowingly cosplaying as software this whole time. But it also nudges at a bigger question: if a machine can replicate the patterns we rely on, were those patterns ever as uniquely ours as we thought? Or were they just well-worn paths we all happened to walk?

I don’t have a neat answer. I’m still going to use “the correction” when it earns its keep. It still works. It still lands. I’m just a little more aware now that what once felt like a signature move might actually be a shared accent … and one that’s been picked up, polished, and redistributed at such a scale that it's now it's an AI tell.

Which, depending on your mood, is either fascinating or irritating.

Not a crisis. Just a shift. (See? Just can’t help myself.)

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Follow Up 

Barron's has just published a piece on AlphaSense's library of corporate documents, earnings call transcripts, SEC filings, and press releases. It indicates  that a single-sentence construction has exploded across corporate America since 2024. The pattern is "It's not just X, it's Y."

Hmmmmm … now I have to consider leaving this tool out of my “go tos” ‘cause AI has made it so ubiquitous that it’s making my writing sound like everybody else’s.

Oh, well.