The AI Detector Eats Itself

Today’s newsletter from Matt Ragland is… weird. It’s titled, “The two words that out you as an AI writer” and boils down to: “genuinely” and “quietly” make your prose sound AI-written. There’s good advice buried in here: if AI gives you prose that doesn’t sound like you, rewrite it. Absolutely agreed. The problem is pretending individual words or stylistic choices can tell you who wrote something. There are specific uses of “quietly” that are characteristic of mid-2026 AI writing, but those words are just words, which ordinary humans use all the time. (Fun experiment: when you encounter an AI-sounding “quietly”, replace it with “low-key” and see what you think of the writing now.) Now here’s the weird part: the post itself is peppered with exactly the kinds of constructions people currently identify as AI-isms: Not because it was wrong. Because it wasn’t his. You didn’t need the runway. You needed the plane. The goal isn’t to write less with AI. It’s to make sure the last person who…