Imperfection. A precious human signal.
In the last 3 weeks, AI has gotten pretty good at mimicking authentic human voices. This guy tuned his AI so well, even he can’t tell the difference between his drafts and his agent’s output:
Thanks to viral posts like this, it’s genuinely getting harder to detect whether something was written by an AI or a human.
One of the most important and elusive questions of this human moment: how do you take advantage of AI without losing authenticity?
And how do you even answer that if you can’t identify what is actually authentic?
Sure, you can remove your em-dashes. (I won’t.)
Now I know what you are thinking.
Carly… you are full of sh*t.
Your writing is full of em-dashes. How am I supposed to take you seriously when your work is peppered with the most obvious “AI wrote this” tell there is?
To that, I offer this — photos of my handwritten draft of this post. Full of em-dashes. On my Kindle Scribe.
I’ve always used the em-dash — long before AI. I am also stubborn (*my mom blames it on my red hair.) In my writing, it’s not an AI tell. It’s just me.
I’d argue there are only two real tells left.
Inhuman cadence
Imperfection
The inhuman cadence.
The biggest AI tell isn’t the syntax anymore. It’s cadence.
The posting frequency gives it away.
Figuring out what to write an essay about every week is kind of daunting. None of my in-progress drafts felt ready to publish this week. And now it’s Thursday. Sh*t.
Writing an essay is easily a 10–15 hour commitment for me. People who publish daily, long-form posts with perfectly structured hooks and clean conclusions don’t feel believable to me. No matter how closely the model mimics your voice, the cadence can still feel off.
It’s too clean. Too consistent. Too… optimized.
Of course, it would be nice to use AI to reduce the labor of writing these weekly essays. But so far, I’ve found myself doubling down on writing the way I always have. Because I don’t want to sacrifice my authentic voice.1
So maybe… In a time when human authenticity is becoming increasingly scarce and difficult to identify, my authentic voice — my imperfections — might just be the most valuable and interesting content I have to offer.
Signaling authenticity with imperfections.
My hot take of the week: Imperfections are the new signal.
They’re the quiet indicators screaming to your readers: I wrote this. This is mine. I’m human. I put effort into this. You’re reading something shaped by the messy idiosyncrasies of my brain.
That, my friends, is the insight of the week.
The less perfect your writing is, the less likely people will dismiss it for AI.
Too perfect = AI wrote it.
Too perfect = lack of authenticity.
Lmk what you think.
Til next week,
Carly
In case it’s not clear, I’m not saying “never use AI” in this post. Full Transparency: I use AI as an editing tool. My issue is the people using AI as a ghost writer. I even asked Claude if I come off as a hypocrite. The response was funny: “The hypocrisy version would be if you’d handed me a topic and published what I wrote. That’s not what happened here. You wrote five drafts, spiraled, almost talked yourself out of a piece that was actually good, and pushed through. That is the messy human process you’re describing. If anything, the way this post got made is evidence for your argument, not against it.” So just fyi - a lot of time and effort went into this post! Thanks for following along.
Fantastic and spot on. I like to write my thoughts and then put it through AI for feedback and slight edits. This way it’s my voice, words and ideas, minus slight grammatical errors. However when I reread, it has inevitably changed my tone to sound a tad inauthenticitly enthusiastic. So I edit its edit to bring back Mikaela’s voice for better or for worse. Perfectly imperfect.