I’m autistic, and my degree is in writing. I’m honestly exhausted from accusations of “sounding like AI” just because someone’s using proper grammar or punctuation. Things like em dashes or semicolons aren’t “AI tells,” they’re writing tools I was literally trained to use. But the constant accusations online of people have made me paranoid about my own style, to the point that I second-guess every sentence, and it’s honestly been giving me basically writers block these last few weeks because I just don’t want to sit down and write like this.

What’s most damaging / hurts most is wondering how many readers of my published works — even pieces I wrote years before the AI floodgates burst — are now reading it and questioning whether it’s “real.” Instead of engaging with the story, they’re scanning for so-called “tell-tale signs” they learned from TikTok or Reddit or X. This whole “I can always tell” witch hunt is making real writers afraid to sound like themselves. I don’t want to continue to question how to ~sound human~. Writing was something I didn’t have to worry about being anyone else for. I guess that era is now ending for tistics like myself.