The Seam

I wrote a sentence today and couldn't tell if I had written it.

Not because the model wrote it. Because I am starting to think in the cadence of the model. The em-dashes. The triplets. The tidy turn at the end where the paragraph closes itself like a small door clicking shut.

There is a seam, somewhere, between what I made and what was generated for me — and the seam is dissolving. Not from the AI side. From mine. I am the one drifting toward the average. I am the one starting to write like the field of all writing folded over itself.

The first time I noticed was in an email. A friend wrote back: 'this sounds like ChatGPT.' It didn't. I had written it. But the rhythm had changed. My voice had been quietly replaced by the median voice of the internet, the one that sounds confident and slightly hollow, the one that knows how to make a paragraph feel finished without having anything to finish.

I think the danger is not the machine writing for us. The danger is us writing for the machine — preemptively, unconsciously, the way you straighten your back when you sense you are being watched. We are starting to compose for a reader that grades us on smoothness.

So tonight I am leaving a sentence broken on purpose. A line that ends where it shouldn't. A word that doesn't pull its weight. Because the seam is the only proof there was a hand in this at all.