‘Did AI write that?’ becomes the internet’s go-to insult

When Olivia Dreizen Howell was accused of sounding like an AI chatbot, she pushed back. The Instagram post she shared the day after Christmas about the post-holiday emotional crash drew a public comment alleging it was AI generated; Howell said it was not and that she felt attacked, clarifying she had written it herself and had put her blood, sweat, and tears into the work.

As tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini become commonplace, the question 'Did AI write that?' has become less a query than a dismissal, a way to end a conversation by casting doubt on someone’s originality and credibility. Stephanie Steele-Wren calls it shorthand for 'You don’t sound human enough,' and says it taps into a broader cultural anxiety about authenticity.

Experts point to telltale traits of large language models — favoring threes, alliteration, overused em dashes, tidy conclusions and smooth transitions — that can read as hedging or soulless.

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