A Sentence Was Flagged as AI. It Was the Human One.

A client loved the whole report and circled one sentence as AI. It was the one I wrote by hand.

Most of what I make now is drafted with AI. Adam, the robot in this strip, is the AI in this office. I dictate, he drafts, I edit, and the client gets something we both touched. Which is why the circle stung. Of all the sentences on all the pages, the one that got flagged was the one that had never been near him.

Matt asks the right question, which is whether the sentence had a feeling in it. It did. It was a thank-you, written early in the morning, meant for the client's team. That is the sentence that read like a machine to him. The machine's sentences read like a person.

People are hunting for the machine in the writing now, and the clues they use are the clues they have heard about. Nobody has a reliable test. So the human sentence gets circled, the machine sentences sail through, and the fix that satisfies everyone is to make the human one sound a little less like someone meant it.

The client in the strip is nobody in particular. The moment is real, and so is the feeling of having my own sentence sent back to me. Adam removed the feeling and the client approved it. I am still deciding whether that was a win.