This Could Have Been a Sentence

Gotta stop asking AI to turn takes into dissertations.

Yeah, but it’s my legs. // Annihilation

Jeudy Viquez once notoriously opened his NBA group chat to a wall of text from his pal Will venting about a girl from college. It was decidedly not about basketball, and Viquez had zero interest in catching the recap. So he replied with three short texts that would equate to a perfect poem and eventually launch an infinite count of online replies:

i ain’t reading all that
i’m happy for u tho
or sorry that happened

A friend screenshot Viquez’s response and shared it with a meme account, and thus it went viral and defined a strange sort of blossoming online era—one with more empathy than the TL;DR Age, yet paired with the messy boundaries of the Everything Is Self-Care Epoch.

I hear myself reciting it all the time now with a repeat rhythm—like we’re back to the 2017 Twitter bit where everyone was writing their own goofball version of the poem “This Is Just to Say” by William Carlos Williams (aka the plums in the icebox poem).

I think of Viquez’s oddly sublime 6-6-6 refrain whenever I see someone optimize an insight or shared joy by way of the robot think tank and ask AI to turn their solid thought into a gaseous online post—as though a great idea for a movie could be best pitched as a bland screenplay with all the rigor and color of an ouroboros trying to speak in market-tested tongues between gasps of choking to death.

The thing about humanity is that we are a charmingly chaotic lot. Just by trying to do something, we are inherently ourselves.

And now, due to AI, people I used to find funny, interesting, and insightful somehow sound both possessed and boring as shit.

We don’t often get definable markers or elaborate presentations when it comes to the (d)evolution of our language. I did once and I was hungover for it.

I was sitting lopsided against the only window of a small meeting room shat out by the Irvine Company and being told that people were no longer asking the internet questions.

This was more than 15 years ago and a wildcard of a friend had swung into town the night before, and Kevin (the coworker I adamantly said looked like Rob Huebel) explained how we, as a species, were moving away from “Where is the nearest Taco Bell?” to “nearest taco bell.”

It felt like a scene from Blade Runner if the movie had a budget of ten bucks. We were no longer to Ask Jeeves; we were to simply make demands of him. He worked for us; let’s make him insane.

I think of this moment surprisingly often—a meditative breath before the information superhighway became Death Race 2Q84. We were a cubicle farm specializing in small business landing pages and keyword campaigns—in the years prior to social media Pac-Mannin’ such ghosts—so it was an important shift.

We were evolving toward efficiency, taking up short hand for the long haul. Exciting! Prophetic! I was just in time too! Because the funniest part of all this was that I’d nearly lost this same job the year before for being too flowery.

These small businesses were named things like A1 Tree Trimming and I was kicking off their pages with copy like, “Born between a dream and a bet in the lull of 1980s Santa Clara,” and my team lead finally pulled me aside to inform me that the copyeditors thought I was a great guy who should also be shot in the head.

That lead, a sparkling gent named Nōn, then worked with me for a spell, helping me to understand that the main point of each brief landing page was value props and service offerings. I would later look back on those meetings as a very writer-specific therapy.

I’ve since reshaped these memories to border on sketches, where Nōn asks what I think the most important part of a certain company is, hoping I’ll correctly point out that they’re the area’s only housecleaning service that also does porches and patios, and I instead ask, “Is it that the co-founders met on a riverboat cruise for singles?”

Nōn was tremendously patient and supportive—and we became dear friends!—and I eventually absorbed crisp, concise writing as a skill for the quiver. There is a time for writing that is lavish, luscious, and long. There is a time for writing that is sharp, succinct, and short.

AI writing is somehow neither. It’s like being stabbed repeatedly with a teddy bear.

You’ll find it across all of social these days, though most noticeably on LinkedIn. Its dull, faux pithy stylings are out there in the open, given that AI’s broadly polished forum gypsum best serves anything vaguely professional (and marketing is sometimes built atop a swamp of buzzwords anyway).

I’ve had to rework my LinkedIn algorithm to avoid stepping into a feed that lands somewhere between How Do You Do Fellow Biz and Invasion of the Body of Work Snatchers. Prior to this, I felt like each scroll would land on a regurgitation of the same uncanny valley girl and cool storytelling bro.

AI posts read logically sound within a vacuum. But they also read like every other AI post in a crowd. “Your brand is more than how you look and sound; it’s how your customer feels” vs. “Your customer wants to know more than how you look and sound; they want to know how you feel” comes across like two androids struggling to convince me they’re real as I unapologetically load two bullets.

I don’t care if a post is a sentence or an essay as long as it’s true—true to nature, not necessarily true on paper—and it’s just that many are now using AI to mutate a very good sentence into an aggressively mediocre essay.

I understand time is a factor and writing doesn’t come naturally to everyone. Yet, much of the time, whatever’s being fed to the prompt machine is enough to be the post itself. I’m astounded by how many times I click “…More” expecting to reach the end of a sentence and am instead greeted by another dozen paragraphs.

Nobody on this increasingly ungreen earth needs poetry written sentence case like:

I’ve never been one to leave a review of hand towels. And then one day that changed.

Because I found one that defined me.

Isn’t that incredible? What if I told you it’s possible to overlook the smallest detail and find a profound integrity in microfibers?

Hand towels are more than drying fabrics cut into rectangles—they’re the centerpieces of our bathrooms. Interior decorations mean so much to our culture; they change us for the better when we find the right one.
And the truth of it is: it’s so us. We love drying our hands.

When we find the right hand towel, we take our time washing our hands knowing there’s a safe space we can hold right after.
But you need hand towels for every occasion.

Here’s the kicker: life is every occasion.

Since we were cave people, we’ve had to dry our hands—parents help kids dry their hands and kids help pets dry their paws. It’s in our DNA. And why is that? Because our hands can’t be wet forever.

So let’s not be wet blankets anymore. Let’s come together and dry ourselves off. Keep your hands clean so that we can shake hands and do great work together.

And so I ask you a simple question: Is this how you want to spend your life?

Alternatively, I ask you this: Are you out of your mind?

Of course, the question I ask most often is simply: Who is this for?

But then I think of that scene in one of Rick & Morty’s earliest episodes where Jerry—a lackluster father, husband, and ad man—pitches the slogan “Hungry for apples?” in an alien simulation that’s running so low grade it eventually shows him “human music” as a series of beeps and boops that barely registers as a sequence, let alone a melody; to which Jerry responds aloud to his otherwise empty car, “…I like it!”

We all know the truth though, that these posts aren’t even really for people. They’re for the algorithm. They’re to help a person play by the stupidest rules imaginable as a means to see any kind of viable return.

Platforms like LinkedIn need a constant input of content to double as, well, an output of content. They reward people who gavage the dead god from the machine. Because LinkedIn’s “sweet spot” is three to five posts a week, and you need a strategy to play that game.

Before I reworked my feed, I would engage posts simply because it helped my pals. I’d start to read their post in earnest, realize it was largely unedited AI blether, click Like, and abandon it. I had zero interest in reading a mile-long hallucination as trippy as sitting in traffic, but I also wanted to see the people in my life succeed and it’s not their fault an algorithm became The Algorithm.

But then I kept getting the same dead-behind-the-eyes As to an unasked Qs. This person ordered a muffin and it taught them the meaning of B2B marketing; this person caught an episode of That Thing You Love and what struck them most was an unrelated memory from a child who doesn’t exist; this person saw a sunset and was reminded that the sun also rises; this person saw themself in that person and within every interaction proves a lesson. Nothing is an isolated experience; everything is content mash.

Of course, none of what I’m writing here is new, radical, or even in response to any one person. AI’s workaday style of copy, especially on LinkedIn, is so prevailing and prosaic that its (co-)authors blur together to me now. I can, however, instantly spot the folks I pay attention to solely because their voice is distinct, due to the miraculous fact that it remains entirely theirs in the year of our tech overlords 2Q26.

That’s the beauty of a human train of thought. It’s distinctive. The way a person thinks, feels, and reasons is a reflection of some profound yet intangible double-wide library of nature and nurture. That train of thought is theirs because it’s shaped and informed by their past, present, and personality. Nobody else has had that exact life; nobody else has been gifted that exact brain. Thus, the way a person expresses and explains themself is inherently their own history of emotions and experiences making a connection with the surrounding world and its hopefully dazzling population.

Writing can just feel so far off from the breeze of conversation because there’s a gap you have to bridge. Articulating yourself in the messy art of dialogue can be a challenge, sure, but there’s a lot more grace to award oneself. The back and forth moves along—casual, fleeting, and instinctive. Writing, meanwhile, has a sense of craft and finality to it. There’s so much white space surrounding what you offer that each sentence can feel like an entire skyline, where you want to believe the truths of yourself live within the margins; you just can’t see all the beauty and complexity that dwell at street level. But in those words is a society that works. From the first capital letter to the closing period, there is a community you care about.

Each language decision—whether to say ‘casket’ or ‘coffin,’ whether to use commas or em dashes, whether to capitalize important words or solely proper nouns—is made uniquely by a piece’s author. Yet, if all posts are conjured by the same lurking scribe, then it’s all too easy to sound banal, even arbitrary and indistinguishable.

Worse though, and the point I’m largely making here, is that way too many people are relying on AI to post a five-second thought in the narrative arrangement of a five-paragraph essay that’s then broken up into 15 oddly formulated bursts. Banal is dull, sure, but banal and garrulous is unreadable. Imagine someone showing up to board game night with a rulebook the size of a Russian tome and it reads like a breathalyzer manual.

To be sure, polish can be a grand quality, but it doesn’t inherently define the quality of a product—especially in writing. Some of the funniest things I’ve read have been tweets; some of the most abysmal things I’ve read have been bestsellers. It’s easy to read great writing and put your writing against it. Writing is a major mode of communication, and we want to make our points well. But trading personal for polished isn’t necessarily a clean swap. It can just as easily botch one’s greatest strength—singularity.

Too much polish can remove the color. Anything made for everyone is made for no one and all that. A lack of typos is usually good; a lack of nuance is usually bad; go for what gets you going. I know everyone wasn’t raised by parents who wanted “Everyone Needs an Editor” in Latin on the family shield, but overly polished can quickly suggest or even outright reveal inauthenticity.

AI music, for example, is dreadfully stupid, but it’s also hyper-polished. Every dumb part that should bore you to death is perfectly arranged. It’s clean, yet totally devoid of meaning. It lacks purpose, connection, or singularity. It’s as memorable and interesting as a car horn. Even calling it “music” for the sake of clarity here feels like referring to an elevator as a travel agent.

If you listen to, say, The Replacements’ Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash, you’d be quick to notice that the 1981 album is messy, noisy, and implacably human. You are listening to four guys who made endless decisions to put out a debut that would delight their scene and rattle the world. It’s filled to the salty brim with fragments, flashes, and flair. Nearly half a century later, it still shreds.

I celebrate that particular album because it gave me my first instance of recognizing greatness beyond perfection. Singer Paul Westerberg has carried a career-long perspective of staying true to one’s nature, as mad and messy as it may prove—that perhaps “human error” focuses too much on the woe of error and not enough on the value of human.

He once said very simply, “People like to see human error when it’s honest. When people see you swing and miss, they start to root for you.”

He also said more boldly, “The soul of rock ‘n roll is mistakes and making mistakes work for you.”

And finally, he said most succinctly, “Stick with your heart and you’ll be fine.”

It’s humans I’m interested in, and I suppose that’s why I’m on social media to begin with. I just never had to contend with what it all meant until the percentage of human-generated art, entertainment, and C-O-N-T-E-N-T took such a hit and subsequent dive.

In 1968, Philip K. Dick wrote (and I suppose genuinely asked), Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Four years later, the author expanded upon the notion when he spoke at the 1972 Vancouver Science Fiction Convention, giving a speech later known as “The Android and the Human.”

In it, Dick wondered about The World to Come and whether it had already arrived, with the external world becoming more animated as humans become more inanimate:

Machines are becoming more human, so to speak… some meaningful comparison exists between human and mechanical behavior. But is it not ourselves that we know first and foremost? Rather than learning about ourselves by studying our constructs, perhaps we should make the attempt to comprehend what our constructs are up to by looking into what we ourselves are up to.

Perhaps, really, what we are seeing is a gradual merging of the general nature of human activity and function into the activity and function of what we humans have built and surrounded ourselves with. A hundred years ago, such a thought would have been absurd, rather than merely anthropomorphic. What could a man living in 1750 have learned about himself by observing the behavior of a donkey steam engine?

Dick went on to note:

I think, at this point, of Tom Paine’s comment about one or another party of the Europe of his time: “They admired the feathers and forgot the dying bird.” And it is the “dying bird” that I am concerned with. The dying—and yet, I think, beginning once again to revive in the hearts of the new generation of kids coming into maturity—the dying bird of authentic humanness.

Three years later, Dick was to give another speech, this time at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, but couldn’t due to illness and thus it became the essay, “Man, Android and Machine.”

In its opener, Dick wonders where the differences lie, where the lines blur, and what it ultimately means for our species and world:

Within the universe there exist fierce cold things, which I have given the name “machines” to. Their behavior frightens me, especially if it imitates human behavior so well that I get the uncomfortable sense that these things are trying to pass themselves off as humans but are not. I call them “androids,” which is my own way of using that word. By “android” I do not mean a sincere attempt to create in the laboratory a human being… I mean a thing somehow generated to deceive us in a cruel way, to cause us to think it to be one of ourselves. Made in a laboratory—that aspect is not meaningful to me; the entire universe is one vast laboratory, and out of it come sly and cruel entities which smile as they reach out to shake hands. But their handshake is the grip of death, and their smile has the coldness of the grave.

Of course, that handshake of ruin and the dystopian grin looming above it isn’t exactly in reference to something like ChatGPT; it’s more reserved for someone like Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI.

Dick goes on to say:

A human being without the proper empathy or feeling is the same as an android built so as to lack it, either by design or mistake. We mean, basically, someone who does not care about the fate which his fellow living creatures fall victim to; he stands detached, a spectator, acting out by his indifference John Donne’s theorem that “No man is an island,” but giving that theorem a twist: that which is a mental and a moral island is not a man.

We are indeed adding and removing parts to ourselves, and one could argue that this is by no means new. We’re the most invasive species this planet has ever seen, and thus we’ve long been proven adaptable.

But while people have pointed to calculators and cell phones as tech that’s added convenience to our lives while respectively diminishing our ability to do mental math and remember phone numbers, neither have come tucked into the seismic shift in how a person expresses and explains themself. What’s happening now is quite new.

Hardly six months passed after the release of ChatGPT when lecturer David Gill wrote an article for Salon called, “Philip K. Dick predicted ChatGPT and its grim ramifications.”

In it, Gill points to Dick’s 1964 novel The Penultimate Truth and its opening, which features a character hidden away in “an Ozmandiasian structure” to compose a speech with the help of his “rhetorizor.” Included in the article is the following version of the scene, lightly edited for length and clarity:

At the keyboard of the rhetorizor he typed, carefully, the substantive he wanted. Squirrel. Then, after a good two minutes of sluggish, deep thought, the limiting adjective smart.

“Okay,” he said, aloud, and sat back, touched the rerun tab.

The rhetorizor, as Colleen reentered the library with her tall gin drink, began to construct for him in the aud-dimension. “It is a wise old squirrel,” it said tinnily (it possessed only a two-inch speaker), “and yet this little fellow’s wisdom is not its own; nature has endowed it —”

“Aw god,” Joe Adams said savagely, and slapped off the sleek, steel, and plastic machine with all of its microcomponents; it became silent.[…]

“Dear,” Colleen said, and sighed, “I heard you type out only two semantic units. Give it more to ogpon.”

“I’ll give it plenty to ogpon.” He touched the on-tab, typed a whole sentence, as Colleen stood behind him, sipping and watching, “Okay?” […]

She read the sentence aloud, “The well-informed dead rat romped under the tongue-tied pink log.”

“Listen, ” he said grimly. “I want to see what this stupid assist that cost me fifteen thousand Wes-Dem dollars is going to do with that. I’m serious; I’m waiting.” He jabbed the rerun tab of the machine.” […]

The rhetorizor, in its cricket’s voice, intoned folksily, “We think of rats, of course, as our enemy. But consider their vast value in cancer research alone. The lowly rat has done the yeoman’s service for huma—”

Again, at his savage instigation, it died into silence.”

[Joe’s wife prods him to write the speech himself] He thought, “I don’t think I could do it, in my own words, without this machine; I’m hooked on it, now.”

[Joe reveals he’s been ordered by his “bureau in Geneva” that the speech he’s writing “has to use a squirrel as the operational entity.”]

On the keyboard of the rhetorizor he vigorously, with deliberation, punched two new semantic units. Squirrel. And — genocide.

The machine, presently, declared, “The funniest thing happened to me on the way to the bank, yesterday.”

Gill goes on to observe that, while the basic concept of the machine wasn’t a new device for fiction, the novelty of Dick’s version was that it was so wearisome:

While the “wordmills” in Fritz Leiber’s 1961 novel “The Silver Eggheads,” Orwell’s “novel writing machine” in “1984,” and “The Engine” in Jonathan Swift’s 1726 satire “Gulliver’s Travels” all appear in print earlier, none of these automated writing systems is quite as bleak and corny as Dick’s rhetorizor.

As a writer myself, I realize I’m brazenly biased here. I love writing. Each paragraph, page, and project is a puzzle to me. I’ve been blessed with an intuition and adoration for a skill that has long given me an advantage in everything from cover letters to online arguments. Being able to make the case for your thoughts, feelings, and beliefs counts for a great deal in this world. So I wholly recognize writing is not easy for many people. (It’s what keeps me in business, honestly.)

But, wonderfully and unfortunately, the most obvious way to become good at something is to simply do it over and over. If my therapist and the 12,000 people on social media I consider her backup are to be believed, consistency is the key to just about everything. You may not do great at first, but whatever you keep doing becomes a pattern that trends upward. If you practice writing, you will get better at writing. If you practice entering prompts, you will get better at entering prompts.

Moreover, as a millennial dude who grew up playing basketball, I obviously activate like a sleeper agent whenever I hear the word “practice,” inevitably muttering at least a line or two of Allen Iverson’s seminal “We ‘Talkin’ About Practice” speech / rant / vision. But we should indeed be talking about practice.

Because. So. Many. People. Have. Good. Ideas.

Even if a person hasn’t spent their adult life honing the ability to articulate concepts and perspectives, they can speak to the truth of their merit. It can be short and sweet; it can be long and verbose. But doing so means batting a high, or even full, percentage of self.

And so I’ve been perplexed by personal/non-work AI use cases I’ve seen, from lengthy AI-written book reviews on Goodreads to lengthy AI-drafted messages handwritten in birthday cards. We’re talking about instances where a single sentence would be more than enough, since none of it’s required to begin with. It’s as though people are adding extra spaces after periods and then making those periods bigger to hit a page count for a paper nobody even assigned them.

With that, I more so understand the usage of AI as an editor. (Omnes eget editorem.) It fixes the car for you, but it certainly doesn’t drive the car up Pacific Coast Highway through Big Sur in the summertime for you.

I offer that because I believe a lot of AI personal writing stems from a sincere desire to better communicate or connect with fellow humans. In that way, AI can seem like a time machine, readily taking someone from the messiness of thought to the cleanliness of execution—alas, sans craft, journey, or experience. Everyone has thoughts; everyone has feelings; not everyone can write well; not everyone enjoys writing.

Writing can even drive writers mad. I mean, hell, there are a half-dozen variations of the adage “I hate to write, but I love having written,” and it’s been attributed to all kinds of writers, ranging from Frank Norris to Dorothy Parker.

But if the hope is indeed to better communicate or connect with fellow humans—and I of course remain profoundly aware that so, so, so, so, so much AI “personal” writing is for some vague push toward thought leadership / influencership / engagementship / hustleship—I think your shortcut through the tunnel costs you the beauty of the scenic route.

While it may save you time, it also obliterates the destination itself because the sentiment I’m seeing more and more is this: If you didn’t take the time to write it, I’m not going to take the time to read it.

So I’m rooting for everyone, but if you’re regularly churning out AI content like some behemoth monstrosity, ya gotta know I ain’t reading all that. I’m happy for you though—or sorry that happened.