You’re Not AI? Prove It.

How the machines forced us to audition as ourselves

I got quoted in The Wall Street Journal this week for noticing something everyone’s feeling but few are naming: the bizarre moments when writers are forced to inject errors into the piece to prove they’re not AI.

But as I read the piece, I realized the real story isn’t the typos or the forced casualness. Those are just symptoms. The real story is existential.

We are living through a reverse Turing Test, except this time the machines aren’t trying to convince us they’re human. We are desperately trying to convince everyone else—and ourselves—that we still are.

And in that desperate performance, something profound is being exposed.

The Absurdity of Performing Humanity

There’s a quiet absurdity here that feels almost Camus-like. We have tools that can generate flawless prose in seconds, and our response is to… make our own work slightly worse on purpose? Not because imperfection makes it better, but because perfection now signals “not me.”

It’s as if we’ve reached a point where the highest form of authenticity is to prove we’re not machines. We’re not just writing anymore. We’re performing the role of “the human writer” for an audience that’s become hyper-vigilant about detecting the artificial.

This isn’t new, of course. Every technological leap has triggered an identity crisis. The camera didn’t kill painting—it forced painters to ask what painting was for. Photography revealed that representation wasn’t the point; soul was.

Now AI is doing the same to language.

But this time it’s more intimate. Language isn’t just how we express ourselves. It is us. It’s the closest thing we have to letting another consciousness peek inside our own. When AI can mimic that voice so convincingly, the question stops being technical (“Did they use AI?”) and becomes ontological: What part of this is actually me anymore?

The Deeper Fear: Obsolescence of the Soul

I’ve spent decades watching how technology reshapes what it means to be human. I remember when email felt revolutionary. Now I watch creators—brilliant, soulful people—wrestle with the quiet terror that their most human offering (their words, their stories, their insight) can be approximated by a statistical model trained on the collective output of humanity.

And this is much bigger than losing our jobs. It’s about losing our meaning.

If AI can write with more clarity, more eloquence, and more apparent empathy than many humans, then what does that say about the value of our own voice? Are we reduced to editors of our own existence? Curators of prompts? Or worse—are we just the last stubborn holdouts refusing to admit the game has changed?

There is a real fear that our creativity, our quirks, our lived wisdom might be… replicable. That the mysterious spark we’ve always called “soul” might turn out to be nothing more than pattern-matching at scale.

And yet…

Here’s the meta twist I keep coming back to: the very act of caring about this distinction proves something AI still can’t touch. A machine doesn’t lie awake wondering if its output feels human. It doesn’t feel the existential vertigo of watching its own voice get cloned. It doesn’t ache for genuine connection the way we do when we sense the gap between polished text and lived experience.

Our anxiety itself is the proof of life.

The New Human Craft: Co-Creation Without Surrender

So where does that leave us?

Not in retreat—adding deliberate flaws like some digital hair shirt. That’s just another mask, another performance. The deeper path is integration. Not hiding the AI, but transcending it.

Think of AI as the ultimate mirror. It reflects back the sum total of human expression so far. When we use it, we’re not cheating. We’re entering into dialogue with the entire archive of human thought—and then we do the one thing the mirror cannot: we push forward from our own irreducible present moment. Our memories. Our scars. Our weird obsessions. Our midnight realizations that no training data could ever capture.

The future of writing isn’t pure human or pure AI. It’s something stranger and more beautiful: a collaboration where the human brings the why and the machine amplifies the how, but the final voice remains unmistakably alive because it is filtered through one specific, unrepeatable consciousness.

This is the work I’ve been doing in my past three books and the one coming out at the end of the month—not teaching people to “sound human,” but to reclaim their humanity through the technology. To use AI as a prosthetic for thought, not a replacement for it. To stand in the tension instead of running from it.

Because the real existential threat isn’t AI writing better than us. It’s us forgetting why we write at all.

We write to be known. To reach across the void and say: here is what it felt like to be me, in this moment, in this body, with these wounds and wonders. No algorithm can fake that presence. It can only approximate the shape of it.

So it’s not about the purposeful mistake in the paragraph. It’s about that moment when we feel another human reaching out—and we know, bone-deep, that they’re really there.

Here’s the link to the full WSJ article where I’m quoted (gift link via my subscription):

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/writers-are-going-to-extremes-to-prove-they-didnt-use-ai-46e7c3f7?st=XTpPb9

And here’s the link to be part of The First Wave, the prelaunch list for my next book, The Humanizers Strike Back.

https://humanizersstrikeback.com

Here’s to writing that doesn’t need to prove anything—because it simply is.