How to sound like a human, not a robot, in the age of AI

Last year, The Economist named “AI Slop” as its 2025 word of the year. “Slop merchants clog up the internet with drivel,” it wrote. Search Google for a health question and you’ll find endless articles filled with AI-written drivel. Scroll through Instagram and it won’t be long before you come across fake clips stitched together with an AI voice-over. We’ve all seen it. AI slop is almost impossible to escape. And it stands to reason that being surrounded by it long enough, we’ll eventually begin to mimic it and start sounding like AI ourselves, much as spending a few weeks in a foreign country can subtly change the way you speak. So recently, I decided to check my own writing. I put several articles into different AI-detection services and asked whether the writing was human or AI-generated. The results were interesting and somewhat gratifying (apparently, I’m still human). More importantly, they revealed some useful lessons about how we can communicate more effectively and distinctively in the age of AI slop. Read widely and build your database of experiences The first indication that my writing was human was specific domain expertise and synthesis. AI services try to mimic human …