May 27, 2026

This email was written by a human

On July 26th, 2026, I’ll press send on my 3,650th daily email.

That’s ten years of daily publishing.

Roughly 2,555 of those messages were written and sent before ChatGPT was launched.

And yet...

Lately, I’ve been accused by an increasing number of subscribers that a certain phrase or punctuation I have used in a daily email was an “obvious tell” that it was “written by AI”.

They tend to project a sense of superiority, like, “AHA! I caught you red-handed!!! I am too smart and savvy to fall for this chicanery!”

Meanwhile, I’ve been saying “Here’s the thing...” and using em-dashes for a decade.

Here’s the thing...

With the current tidal wave of AI-generated text, it’s understandable that people would start “seeing” AI slop everywhere - even when it’s just my normal human slop :-)

That being the case, it’ll be interesting to see what actual human writers do to “prove” they really wrote something without the assistance of AI.

More typos?

Less editing?

More stream-of-consciousness speech-to-text verbal diarrhea?

Maybe.

(But then the AIs will just start to copy the imperfections, right? Anyhoo...)

I dunno what’s going to happen, but I think “decreasing the quality of the writing to prove that a human wrote it” is a dead-end.

If I had to guess, I’d say most good writing will soon be AI-assisted in the same way that most good books are editor-assisted.

Only time will tell, but if I’m right, one possible outcome of this would be more really good self-published books, which is something I’d enjoy.

Just speculation. We’ll see...

Yours,

—J

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