Dumpster Fire

People online confuse shamelessness with strength and authenticity. And the internet rewards it with increased exposure. 

Every week someone proudly broadcasts behavior that should've inspiresd a quiet moment of self-reflection and maybe a long walk. Now it gets posted ... and monetized.

Cruelty gets rebranded as “telling it like it is.” Refusing nuance becomes “standing your ground.” Public humiliation passes for entertainment. Meanwhile, basic self-awareness is treated like weakness ... which is unsettling considering civilization more or less depends on people occasionally feeling embarrassed by and stifling their worst impulses.

I’m not supporting toxic shame or repression. I’m just suggesting that more attention be paid to the small internal voice that says, “Maybe don’t turn every selfish thought into content.” That voice used to help people coexist. Now we train ourselves to ignore it because algorithms prefer confidence over reflection.

Everything now is performance. Outrage is content. Ignorance has a Patreon tier. People treat accountability like it’s an attack on creativity instead of the bare minimum requirement for living among other humans without turning every interaction into a public crisis.

But the algorithms love it because frictionless vanity scales beautifully. Thoughtfulness does not. Reflection doesn’t trend. Nobody goes viral for quietly reconsidering their opinion after reading a book and taking a walk.

We’ve built machines that reward visibility over wisdom, then act surprised when culture turns into a nonstop competition to say the most emotionally charged thing with the least amount of thought behind it.

I still think people are capable of better. I’m just no longer convinced the internet is particularly interested in helping.

Messiah or Villain

The reaction of writers to AI is interesting. One crowd treats it like a messiah. Another treats it like a villain.

For me it boils down to that, for effective writing, the fundamentals still matter. Probably more than ever. Good ideas are still rare. Taste still matters. Judgment still matters. 

A machine can produce a thousand sentences before breakfast ... but most of them still need someone who knows the difference between finished and merely generated. Because AI doesn't magically make a mediocre writer brilliant. It just lets a good writer spend less time pushing the wheelbarrow and more time deciding where the bricks belong.

Most technologies are far less dramatic than the people arguing about them. In my experience, technologies tend to be multipliers: They make good habits more productive and bad habits more obvious. So, when I think about AI, I keep coming back to the same conclusion I reached with other transformative technologies: 

Learn to think. Learn to write. Then learn the tools.

Not because the algorithm demands it. Because your time is worth more than pretending the clock stopped in 2018.

Overthinking

 

Along with checking for proper spelling, my editing process includes double-checking words to make sure they mean what I think they mean.

Recent examples: 

Panacea. I used it to mean "cure-all." I was right, but I felt compelled to double-check.

Same thing with proscribe. It looked wrong. Did I mean to use the word prescribe? 

And the same overthinking had me arguing with myself about infer. Was I confusing it with imply?

 

NOTE:

Proscribe means to forbid or outlaw while prescribe means to recommend.

The writer implies (hints), and the listener or reader infers (draws a conclusion).

 

Upscale Oops!

The upscale restaurant had an upscale bathroom.

An interior decorator made it feel comfortable and welcoming. More like a living room than a bathroom.

But as the restaurant soon learned the designer lamp and lampshade that were perfect for the design aesthetic were a failure for installation in a bathroom.

Oops!

"Please do not throw trash in the lampshade." Just a few words on a Post-It note tell a full story.

Polished vs. Interesting

 

We've confused being polished with being interesting. And I blame that on ChatGPT, Claude, and the rest of the AI gang.

Not because AI is bad at writing. It's often annoyingly competent. It can organize ideas, tidy up sentences and produce something perfectly acceptable in seconds. That's exactly the problem. "Perfectly acceptable" is becoming the new default.

The result? We're wallpapering the internet with competence.

But as a writer, my goal is not just competence. It’s about developing memorable ideas … and they rarely arrive dressed sensibly. They stumble in sideways. They start as a throwaway comment, a ridiculous comparison, or a question that makes everyone in the room pause for a second longer than feels comfortable. Creativity has always had the manners of a scruffy dog. It wanders off the path, rolls in something questionable, then somehow comes back carrying exactly what you needed.

Algorithms don't really do that. They smooth the edges. They average things out. They're brilliant at predicting the next word. Less brilliant at inventing the sentence that shouldn't work but somehow does.

That's why I'm becoming suspicious of anything that feels too neat. The perfect LinkedIn post. The flawless marketing framework. The universal formula for creativity. They all remind me of hotel artwork. Technically fine, but nobody has ever gone back to look at it.

Maybe the competitive advantage isn't working harder to sound professional. Maybe it's refusing to sand off the rough edges that make your thinking recognizably yours. Different has always looked a little weird at first. That's usually how you know it's worth paying attention to.

Don’t confuse being competent with being compelling. They're not the same thing. One gets approval. The other gets remembered.

LinkedIn and AI Slop

Every few months, the internet invents a new button that's supposed to save us from ourselves.

This time it's LinkedIn’s "Seems like AI slop."

My first response was positive, but then I started asking questions: 

• Who’s reviewing these reports? 
  
  
• What action will be taken by the person/people doing the reviewing? 
  
  
• What’s the likelihood of people just using it to report anything they simply don't like?

Hmmmm, maybe the answer isn't another reporting tool.

Maybe it's scrolling past things that don't deserve your attention whether it’s AI generated slop or human generated slop. You know what I’m talking about: the content equivalent of instant mashed potatoes … technically food, but nobody's excited about it. Generic. Weightless. Beige. Gone from your memory before you've finished scrolling.

Not everything needs a button. The best way to kill bad content is to starve it, not report it.

_________________________

One more question for you: Is this a move from LI to limit AI posts/comments or just another way to train the AI they offer to write your posts/comments?

Warning

 

The White House wants a sign at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History warning visitors that its exhibits were created by people who "don't want you to love your country." The claim is that the museum has been captured by a "radical, activist ideology" and can't be trusted to tell America's story honestly. In other words, politicians with agendas should decide which parts of history you're allowed to see.

But a museum with exhibits about slavery doesn't want you to hate America. It wants you to see America. The real one: complicated, messy, remarkable, inspiring, and impossible to understand by looking away.

Loving a country isn't the same as refusing to look at it. If anything, pretending the hard parts never happened is a far greater insult than putting them behind museum glass. You don't honor a nation by editing its memory. You honor it by trusting people to see the whole picture and decide, for themselves, what kind of future deserves to be built.

Mind the Gap

 

Every successful person is basically an iceberg in a designer suit. You get exposed to a sliver … just the surface: the title, the portfolio, the rehearsed introduction. You see the sum total of what they feel safe presenting.

What we see is the part they’ve learned to display. What we don’t see is the slog.

We don’t see the job they took because rent doesn’t barter with dreams. 

We don’t see the night everything fell apart and they kept going anyway, because the alternative felt like drowning in slow motion. 

We don’t see their losses … the ones that shrank them first, then, eventually, made room for something else to grow. 

We don’t see the  constellation of tiny, paper-thin, fleeting, easily missed wins that kept them from quitting.

Most people’s “overnight successes” are built from years of bleary predawn mornings, oddball mentors who showed up at the right hour, moments of luck that could’ve gone another way if the universe had sneezed, and the kind of stubbornness that borders on fictional.

When we encounter them out in the wild … shiny, confident, wearing accomplishment like a well-fitted sport coat … we forget all of that. We assume ease. We assume clarity. We assume they were born on third base and woke up already stretching for home.

This habit of seeing only the surface is potentially dangerous. It tricks us into comparing our internal draft pages with someone else’s final-print edition. You don’t see the similarities in your struggle, when you're only exposed to (or focus on) their highlight reel. And there’s no faster way to feel like you’re failing at a race you didn’t know you entered.

No one gets where they are by coasting. They get there by pushing through the molasses-thick patches of everyday life, by dragging yesterday’s version of themselves uphill until something finally gives. They get there through heartbreak, through dead ends, and by stubbornly pushing forward every time the universe said, “Nope, not now.”

So the next time you meet someone who seems impossibly put-together, remember this: There’s a whole basement beneath that living room. Being human is a long, winding apprenticeship. No one gets certified without bruises. No one grows wings without first lugging around some astonishingly heavy bones.

Don’t compare the tip of their iceberg to your total existence. It’s psychological self-torture … a recipe for misery that keeps you focused on what you don’t like about yourself and your life.

Default Setting

AI is stealing something important from us. It’s ruining wonder.

In the past, if I watched a video of someone doing something extraordinary, I’d think, How did they do that? Or I'd see a video of a brave dog rescue another animal and be happy that life occasionally produces stories better than fiction.

Now my brain interrupts with a different reaction: "Is this AI?"

Instead of enjoying the moment, my brain starts fact-checking it. Every incredible photo, every unbelievable performance, every heartwarming moment now arrives with an invisible disclaimer: Proceed with skepticism.

That's a loss.

Of course, AI didn't invent fake things. Photoshop has been lying to us for decades. But AI has made doubt so cheap that we spend it on everything.

Sometimes a breathtaking photo is the product of a photographer who waited six freezing hours for the right light.

Sometimes a dancer is actually that good.

Sometimes a dog really does something that reminds you why people don't deserve dogs.

We used to assume something remarkable probably had a remarkable explanation … years of practice, ridiculous talent, dumb luck, or the weirdness of being human. Now, thanks to AI, suspicion is our default setting … and our lives are diminished because of it.

Not Gonna Change

 

I like short sentences. I like lists of three. And, yes, I love me an em-dash.

Apparently, those are all “AI tells” that’ll make an Artificial Intelligence detector flaps its little wings and sound an alarm: Beep beep - suspicious human AI use detected.

Cute. But I didn’t build my voice in a prompt window. I built it in drafts. In meetings. On deadlines.

I earned my word scars. And now I’m supposed to stop writing how I write because some detector wags its algorithmic finger?

Nah.

I’ve been writing professionally for a long time. Long enough to know what works. Long enough to know what’s mine. Long enough to know I’m here to connect with readers, not impress a robot.

If a machine thinks I'm a machine, that’s not my problem, that’s a design flaw. File a bug report. Tell tech support the human has too much rhythm. 'Cause I'm not changing. Not gonna write like a middle-school book report to make a silicon hall monitor feel safe.

I was here before the detectors. Before the red flags. Before the breathless warnings that creativity might be “generated.” I write like this because it’s how I think. I’m not gonna scrub the fingerprints off my voice.

I write with teeth. And breath. And the occasional verbal middle finger.

If that trips your digital tripwire? Good. Means I’m still weird enough to be human.

And I’m not gonna change.

Not for detectors. Not for flags. Not for whatever robot snoop evolves next.

And if that’s a problem for the robots, fuck ‘em. I’ll be over here … typing with intent, smirk fully engaged.

PS Here's proof that Shakespeare used AI to write his plays:

_________________________

Check out my song: Spot the Bot (The I Miss My Em-Dash Blues)

Schedule your hardest work when your brain is strongest.

 

My most productive writing times are 7am to 11am and 4pm to 6pm.

Those times have changed over the years, but I’ve consistently enjoyed about 6 highly productive hours a day. Sure, I’ve had to grind out work outside those hours. I’m a pro and can get the job done well any time, anywhere … just maybe not in peak efficiency.

So I try to schedule my most important, highest priority work into that time frame I know I’m at my best. And recharge during “off” hours.

How ‘bout you? Have you figured out where your productivity “sweet spot” is?

________________________

The story behind "Crank It Up To 11"

The Future That Expired Before It Arrived

 

In 2021, Facebook renamed itself Meta. A bold move.

The name Meta came from “the metaverse", an idea from dystopian novels of a place where people escaped from a hellish real world. And the move was based on a simple idea: the future would happen inside headsets. We’d all wander into a glossy digital elsewhere while the real world quietly smoldered in the background.

Mark Zuckerberg seemed convinced this was where life was headed: goggles on, reality optional.

Now that whole push toward virtual reality has mostly… evaporated. Not dramatically. Not with a cinematic collapse. Just a slow corporate shrug, the way trends usually die …fading like a New Year’s resolution.

What fascinates me isn’t that the bet failed. Big bets fail all the time. It’s the speed of it.

The company renamed itself after something that was supposed to be the future… and that future never managed to become the present. It skipped straight to the past. It promised disruption, but ended up speed-running obsolescence.

There’s something oddly perfect about a tech company doing that. The tech industry worships the future so intensely that sometimes it trips over it, face-plants, and accidentally invents nostalgia for last week.

Meanwhile, the rest of us are still just using our phones to text people and watch cat videos. Reality, stubborn as ever, refuses to go out of style.

Battery Panic

Modern batteries come with dashboards, warnings, and color codes ... your phone practically files a missing persons report when it hits 20%.

So kids today don't experience battery panic. Real battery panic. The 1980s kind. The scavenger hunt kind. The panic that drove you to check other devices to see if they had a fresher pair to steal.

Back then, batteries were household currency. Your quality of life was dictated by AAs and they were always in short supply. The Walkman ate them. The Game Boy ate them faster. Music dragged. Flashlights dimmed. Toys became haunted plastic bricks. And every smoke detector in America seemed to wait until 3 a.m. to announce its dissatisfaction with your battery management system.

Every house had a supply of new batteries rolling around in a kitchen drawer alongside pens with petrified ink, keys to long forgotten locks, and rubber bands fossilized into strange geometric shapes. But along with the fresh batteries were a handful of batteries too dead to trust but too alive to throw away. You never actually knew how much power was left. There was no way to tell them apart, so you’d grab a handful and test them in three different devices before you got the power back or admitted defeat.

That uncertainty is unacceptable today. Now we just plug our phone in before bed and wake up to it fully recharged. The whole thing happens quietly while we sleep, like technology tucking itself in for the night.

Kids today will never understand why my entire childhood felt like a combination of a low-grade energy crisis combined with a desperate treasure hunt.

Technology Isn't the Threat

AI didn't make us lazy. It just handed our laziness a power tool.

But is it removing busywork or removing the work that actually teaches us something?

It's easy to have AI generate 50 ideas instead of wrestling with one on your own. Easier still to ask AI what customers want instead of having a conversation with actual customers. The shortcut feels productive because the output arrives instantly. But output isn't the same thing as understanding.

What can be lost in the process is judgment, which grows slowly, through repetition, dead ends, and the occasional spectacular mistake. Sure, AI can help me move faster, but it can't hand me the instinct that comes from doing the work. Experience has a habit of charging tuition before it hands over wisdom. AI can skip the line, but it can't waive the fee.

The people getting the most from AI don't seem interested in replacing their thinking. They use it the way a good mechanic uses better tools … not to avoid knowing the engine, but to fix it faster.
Technology isn't the threat. Outsourcing curiosity is.

The moment I stop asking why and let the machine answer questions I never bothered to think through, I'm not saving time. I'm giving away the one thing that was mine to begin with: my judgment.

Who won the 2026 World Cup?

 Most people will name the team.

Some might mention David Beckham.

10+ sponsorships. 

$25+ million payday. 

Not bad for someone who didn't kick a ball in this year's tournament.

Nicely played, Sir David.

Nicely played.

_________________________

When the dust clears:

For Beckham: He's found a way to sell the same face over and over. Brilliant asset management.

For the Brands: They think they're buying Beckham's credibility, when they're mostly paying to reinforce Beckham's fame. There's a name for it: the Vampire Effect. The celebrity walks away with all the attention, while the brand quietly fades into the background. You remember Beckham. The logo? Not so much.

The Result: An asset stops being distinctive the moment it's rented out to everyone else. If Beckham is selling everything, he isn't a signal anymore. And while he's building Brand Beckham every time his face appears on a screen, the brands (unless they've locked down exclusivity) may just be paying to increase the value of someone else's brand while slowly diluting their own.

Will Working for Yourself Deliver the Freedom You Crave?

 

People romanticize the idea of working for themselves. As if you hand in your notice on Friday and wake up on Monday as your own boss, sipping coffee in a sunlit home office, answering to nobody.

It's a lovely story, but that's not how it works. It leaves out the part where your business quietly moves into your head and refuses to pay rent … even when you're technically off the clock, it's still following you around, scratching at the back of your mind.

In reality, it takes years of chaos, bad decisions, lucky breaks, and figuring things out before you earn anything resembling freedom.

Working for yourself is hard. So is working a 9-to-5, raising kids, staying healthy, and keeping relationships alive. So is pretty much everything worth doing. Life isn't divided into "hard" and "easy." It's divided into things that are hard for reasons you choose, and things that are hard because someone else chose them for you.

So if you decide to work for yourself, and if you’re successful, the hard work you pour into your business will eventually give you something back: Freedom … but perhaps a different kind of freedom than you originally imagined.

Not freedom from responsibility. Freedom to decide which responsibilities are worth carrying.

If you're lucky, and stubborn enough to keep going through the messy years, the scales eventually tip. The business stops feeling like a fire you constantly have to put out and starts behaving more like a well-tended garden. It still needs attention, but it doesn't demand your soul before breakfast.

Owning a business isn't the shortcut people sell online.

It's just another difficult path.

But, if you're like me, it'll turn out to be the one worth taking.

_________________________

If you are a marketing writer who wants to be self-employed, check out Why Going Freelance Might Not Be the Best Fit for Every Marketing Write useful information to use in your decision-making.

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")