This week I found gardening advice for a plant I have issues with. The article was so obviously personal and human-written that I wrote the author a few words of praise. It felt so fresh and different to hear about how her chicken love that plant. She answered quickly and proudly boasted that she never uses AI to write.

I write about German bureaucracy for immigrants. I chose simplicity and succinctness over personality. It works for this purpose, and I got a lot of praise for it, but now it’s harder to differentiate my writing from AI slop at first glance.

My newsletter and social media posts are deliberately more personal. They gave me a chance to loosen up, use idioms, be sarcastic.