Chat GPT is Making You Look Dumb

Every day, thousands of people broadcast their incompetence through perfectly bland, soulless content that screams one thing: they have outsourced their brain to a chatbot. You can feel it before you can prove it. The language is technically correct yet emotionally vacant, grammatically polished yet somehow stripped of any actual thought. It reads like a corporate press release trying to cosplay as a personality.

You know the tells.

The hashtags read like they were generated by a plugin that has never experienced a human conversation. Then there is the rhythm. That weirdly polished cadence that cycles through the same tired sentence structures, the same safe phrasings, the same painfully predictable “punchlines”. Constant parallelism becomes a crutch. The tidy one-liner constructions that pretend to be clever only reveal that nobody bothered to think beyond "lets just have Chat write it". The moment words like “delve”, “craft”, “lands”, or “something meets something” appear, you can almost hear the autocomplete mechanic wheezing in the background.

Exaggerated enthusiasm paired with weirdly formal phrasing creates writing that feels like a Victorian butler trying to run a LinkedIn personal brand. Everything is “transformative”, “impactful”, “empowering”. Nobody seems to be simply saying what they mean. Instead of a human voice, you get a generic professional persona that could belong to any consultant, coach, founder, or agency on the internet. The copy is so smoothed out that it stops being language and starts being packaging.

There is a cognitive cost to this outsourcing. When a machine does the heavy lifting of structuring arguments, selecting vocabulary, and doing all the legwork, the human brain sits in the passenger seat. You skim what was generated, make a few edits, and convince yourself you “wrote” it. In reality, you couldn't be bothered. You never clarified what you truly think. You never confronted the awkwardness that forces you to choose a stance. The result is content that you cannot remember because you never genuinely produced it, there is no corresponding mental imprint.

That generic, committee-written feel is not invisible to your audience. People who consume large volumes of content quickly develop pattern recognition. They notice the same sentence stems repeating across different accounts. They feel the absence of specificity, the lack of concrete detail, the way everything sounds like it was assembled from the same small box of “smart-sounding” Lego bricks. They might not articulate it, but they experience your posts as distant, replaceable and suspiciously frictionless. The central problem is not fluency. The problem is that there is no trace of lived experience in the writing.

Educators have been complaining about this for months. Assignments are turning in that look flawless on the surface and hollow inside. Essays with impeccable grammar but no original insight. Reflections that never once sound like someone actually wrestled with the topic. The same thing is creeping into professional content. Brand founders, marketers and creators are publishing copy that could be swapped out with someone else’s and no one would notice. When language loses its fingerprints, it loses its power.

The irony is almost comical. In trying to sound more polished, more intelligent, more “on-brand”, people end up advertising that they cannot think clearly without synthetic scaffolding. Perfectly structured, emotionless prose with slightly off phrasing does not read as “efficient workflow”. It reads as “outsourced cognition”. When your presence is built on text you did not mentally inhabit, you are asking your audience to trust a version of you that does not exist.

There is also a developmental trap in constant reliance. Writing is thinking in slow motion. When you skip that process, you skip the cognitive workout that sharpens your judgment, your discernment and your ability to connect dots. If you repeatedly hand first-draft responsibilities to a machine, your own mental muscles atrophy. You stay stuck at the same level of vague ideas and shallow takes. The tool saves you time in the short term but quietly taxes your long-term ability to articulate anything worth saying. I mean I have NEVER been more grateful for my literature degree.

None of this means “do not use AI”. It means stop using it as a personality substitute. Use it to research, to surface angles, to pressure-test your arguments, to outline possibilities. Use it to challenge your blind spots and stretch your thinking. But the moment it starts replacing your voice rather than supporting your thinking, you are no longer in charge.

People want to hear from people. YOU carry oddly specific details that no model would invent in that exact way. YOU have turns of phrase that are slightly imperfect but deeply human. YOU reflect contradictions, hesitations, and perspective shifts that come from a real person deciding what to say, not a system predicting what usually comes next. That is what your audience is looking for when they scroll past another polished paragraph on a white background. They are scanning for signs of life.

So no, your goal is not to make ChatGPT sound more human. Your goal is to to the work, sound like yourself: informed, sharpened and supported by tools, but unmistakably YOU. The internet (the WORLD even) needs people who are willing to actually think and risk being specific, divisive, god-forbid; wrong!

insights

october 3, 2025