![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/cd91358eea33d17f837d6eacc5598a2f8e-aiwriters.rsquare.w700.png\")
<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
\n Illustration: New York Magazine\/Getty\n <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
When Jared Hewitt\u2019s co-worker claimed last winter that Hewitt used AI to write an incident report, she did it publicly. \u201cAnd I work at a day care, so she was berating me in front of children,\u201d he says. The co-worker read the document out loud, pointing to the words \u00adjuxtaposition and \u00adcircumstantial as evidence of a machine-generated influence. \u201cI don\u2019t write in a casual way but a much more serious, precise way,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd I\u2019ve paid the price for living in a ChatGPT society.\u201d<\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t the first time Hewitt\u2019s prose has been pegged as AI, and he thinks he knows why. He has a stutter, and when he\u2019s typing, he can speak uninterrupted. It is a luxury he takes full advantage of: \u201cOnce I\u202fstart writing, I can\u2019t really stop.\u201d Like a chatbot, he goes long. He adds paragraph breaks for posts on Reddit and peppers in research, even when the subject is mundane \u2014 say, the actress Willa Fitzgerald\u2019s role in the low-budget 2024 thriller Strange Darling. (\u201cBetween Strange Darling and newer projects like A House of Dynamite and Regretting You, her career feels like it\u2019s steadily expanding,\u201d he wrote in a post that one commenter complained was AI generated, \u201cand I have no doubt in my mind that she\u2019ll eventually land the role that finally pushes her fully into the awards circuit, whether in film or television.\u201d) Hewitt is also neurodivergent. \u201cGrowing up, I had a strong obsession with writing,\u201d he says. He was always given good grades in English, but now, with the massive uptick in AI-generated text, all the time he spent happily working to improve his prose strikes him as a liability.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a new entity among us, and it\u2019s getting better at disguising itself \u2014 but it is becoming \u201calmost too human to be credible,\u201d as one character says about a possible robot in the Isaac Asimov short story \u201cEvidence.\u201d The mood is paranoid: This presence is \u00adproducing a gigantic amount of language, much of it filtered through people we know, whether they\u2019re using it for Hinge messages or LinkedIn posts (or texts from your mother on the morning of your divorce<\/a>). Last week, Hachette became the first major publisher to cancel the planned publication of a book<\/a>, the horror novel Shy Girl, over suspected AI use, prompting<\/a> authors<\/a> online<\/a> to spiral about whether their own work could carry some whiff of LLM. After all, because we humans are natural parrots, ChatGPT may be changing our vocabulary<\/a> possibly even if we\u2019ve never used it at all. But people \u2014 real people \u2014 are still writing all kinds of things too: fantasy novels, short stories, fan fiction, Reddit comments, Wikipedia pages, Fragrantica perfume reviews. Emails and incident reports and legal briefs, many of which could have been done with the help of ChatGPT or some other AI writer, yet for whatever reason were not.<\/p>\n The effect is that everyone is trying to \u00adfigure out who is LLM and who is human. Sometimes, we are getting it wrong. \u201cPeople are going off vibes,\u201d says the historical novelist Kerry Chaput, who was horrified when a reader thought a social-media post she wrote about her neurogenic cough was ChatGPT generated. (\u201cStifling my voice \u00adcreated real, physical damage,\u201d it read in part. \u201cIt shows how deeply we all need to feel the power of speaking our truth.\u201d) As a genre writer, she was especially unsettled by the accusation. Authors of romance and fantasy and historical fiction \u201care always getting attacked,\u201d she says. \u201cThere are word-count conventions, there are sentence conventions. There are rules to writing that we all follow.\u201d How can she prove that the formulas she follows predate the ones ChatGPT adheres to so rigorously?<\/p>\n Chaput is not alone. Ines, a writer in Morocco, learned English as a third language and sometimes wonders if her attention to the rules of grammar has put her work at risk of being mistaken for something spun up by AI. \u201cWhen I became freelance, I responded to an ad for a ghostwriter,\u201d she says. \u201cThey asked me to write 3,000 words, and they gave me five days to finish it. I took my sweet time and I wrote it and I loved it. When I sent it, not even two minutes later, the person I interviewed with responded and told me I was using AI.\u201d Ines isn\u2019t sure why her writing sounded like it was generated by token predictions, but she has theories. Like her, ChatGPT often uses em dashes, and there\u2019s a certain \u201cpattern\u201d both she and AI follow for readability, alternating short sentences with longer ones.<\/p>\n AI detectors have in fact been shown to be biased against non-native English writers. \u201cThe irony is maddening: You spend a lifetime mastering a language, adhering to its formal rules with greater diligence than most native speakers, and for this, a machine built an ocean away calls you a fake,\u201d the Kenyan writer Marcus Olang\u2019 said in a Substack post<\/a>. Trained on a corpus of formal writing, ChatGPT, he thinks, \u201caccidentally replicated the linguistic ghost of the British Empire\u201d \u2014 the same ghost haunting the schools where he was drilled in the Queen\u2019s English. There is what you might call a cleanliness penalty. The writers punished are the ones who have a knack for pristine grammar, so different from the clumsy-thumbed way most of us type.<\/p>\n Jason Bennett Thatcher, a business professor at the University of Colorado Boulder who was raised mostly across Asia, has noticed the bias too. \u201cI go back to the books I learned to write English from, and the word choices they gave me are literally the word choices\u201d that people associate with AI, he says \u2014 terms like boast and testament and foster. \u201cSo you have all these people coming from the Global South. They\u2019re former Commonwealth countries. They use the same vocabulary that whoever\u2019s coming up with these AI detectors is flagging as AI.\u201d A journal turned down a paper he and some collaborators wrote, he says, in part because the editor believed they used ChatGPT to generate text. Most of the collaborators had learned English as a second or third language; they used AI to copyedit the work, but the words, Thatcher says, were their own.<\/p>\n The \u201cAI accent<\/a>\u201d \u2014 a tonally even lilt that doesn\u2019t stray into ums and likes \u2014 also has some overlap with what you might call a neurodivergent affect. \u201cI\u2019ve put my own writing into AI detectors, and I usually get between 40 to 60 percent AI,\u201d says Hewitt, the day-care worker. \u201cIt shocks me because I can speak for myself. I\u2019ve never once relied on AI for writing.\u201d Carlos, a 24-year-old from Brazil, believes AI models and autistic people might have a similar media appetite, voraciously digesting large amounts of text. \u201cOur social isolation \u2014 by choice or by \u00adexclusion \u2014 leads us to find alternative methods to emotionally connect to others,\u201d he says, including deep immersion in comics or literature. (For him, it was an obsession with the Brazilian novelist, poet, and playwright Machado de Assis.) When he was repeatedly confronted on a Discord server for his suspiciously formal writing, \u201cit became quite obvious to me that no matter what I said or what I showed as evidence, it wouldn\u2019t be enough to satisfy some,\u201d he says. Another autistic person I\u202fspoke to, a high-fantasy writer named Kari who has been accused multiple times of using AI, says she has loyal readers watch her writing sessions on a video chat. The idea is they could testify on her behalf if she is accused of writing with AI again.<\/p>\n Judy, an autistic kindergarten ESL teacher in Massachusetts, was accused by her principal in a meeting for supposedly using ChatGPT; the principal later apologized. Judy describes her writing tone as formal, and she avoids using emotional language. As she sees it, AI language sounds the way it does because it borrowed from autistic people first. \u201cOn the internet, if you look for things that were written to explain something clearly, a lot of the people who are able to really precisely and clearly explain something are neurodivergent people,\u201d she says. \u201cIf ChatGPT is trawling the internet and scraping whatever it can find, it is emulating that style.\u201d A big chunk of the internet, she argues, could very well be written by autistic writers. \u201cA lot of my friends who are Wikipedia editors are people who have a huge passion for Star Wars, say, and they\u2019re going to write a page about every single movie and check it regularly. And that\u2019s their autism, but it\u2019s also just their writing style.\u201d Now it is also ChatGPT\u2019s.<\/p>\n The particular snarl we\u2019re in is new. But some people have been accused of sounding robotic for most of their lives. \u201cI turned 63 this March, and literally this has been going on even before there was AI,\u201d a handwriting instructor and remediation consultant I\u2019ll call Sarah, who\u2019s also autistic, tells me. \u201cI was often accused of being some kind of robot that was running a program.\u201d Talking to her, I\u2019m not totally surprised: She speaks in complete paragraphs, articulates every -ing, and draws from a bundle of references including Germanic Viking runes and the Kurt \u00adVonnegut story \u201cHarrison Bergeron.\u201d She has the loquaciousness of a large-language model, for better and worse.<\/p>\n Sarah\u2019s social-media accounts are frequently banned; she\u2019s tried different tactics for writing under different handles, but she usually ends up getting flagged. \u201cI don\u2019t know what I\u2019m doing wrong,\u201d she says. What we might call everyday English, with its sentence fragments and misplaced commas, is just not how she writes or talks, and though she\u2019d be willing to adapt, she hasn\u2019t figured out how. In the end, to her, all these people making false AI accusations seem to be enacting a simple category error: They sense that something is different, possibly \u201ca little bit off,\u201d but when they can\u2019t figure out what it is, they decide they must be in the presence of a nonhuman author. \u201cImagine if a dog thought that a cat was a robotic dog because it didn\u2019t quite act or look like a dog,\u201d she says. \u201cThat\u2019s the situation we\u2019re in. I\u2019m not a robotic dog; I\u2019m a cat.\u201d<\/p>\n Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism. Want more stories like this one? Subscribe now<\/a>
\n If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the March 23, 2026, issue of
\n New York\u00a0Magazine.<\/p>\n
\n to support our journalism and get unlimited access to our coverage.
\n If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the March 23, 2026, issue of
\n New York Magazine.<\/p>\n