◦ Aging Like Milk ◦

malthus : “ i’ve come to you again my savior for i have committed the worst sin i’ve ever committed , i’ve danced with the devil “

I post on Reddit. “AI slop,” they comment. “and if it isn’t, it’s bad, mediocre writing.”

“No, I am not a bad writer.” I have the audacity to say. “Writing is part of what I do professionally. I get paid to do this.”

Someone else posts on Reddit. A chat from Bumble, where a man has the gall to use the unnatural em-dash. “No one uses the em-dash,” they say. It’s a trope at this point, I know. “The hypen is much more common. I don’t know where to even find the em-dash. Plus, he said you were “elite”. No one would say that.”

“The hypen isn’t grammatically correct.” I tell them, looking over the chat log. It’s a real person on the other side, their personality obfuscated by the nerves that come with reaching out on a dating app. There’s subtle humor, missing punctuation. Still, 100 people condemn it as AI. It’s more feasible to them that someone would edit those human elements back in manually than type it themselves.

I post on Reddit. I tell them my writing keeps being called AI slop. They say it is, it is. Use fewer periods. Capitalize less. Ignore the rules. A real person wouldn’t write like that. A real person wouldn’t use those words, or say it like that. I’m a real person. I can’t prove it to them.

Someone, finally, says that the tone of my post matches how some books are written. That maybe it would be good for those who doubt that the writing is man-made to read more man-made books.

“You think we don’t read?” They ask. Then something more incendiary: “You think you’re better than us?”

And, hey? Bad news, babes. This isn’t hyperbole. This is all real shit that has happened in the last week.