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I got an email this week from someone I'd recently met through work. It was a nice email. It referenced things we'd actually talked about, was polished and thoughtful and professional, all the things. But halfway through reading it, I said out loud, "Is there anyone in there?" The grammar was clean, the structure was perfect. It had every signal of care and zero evidence of a person. You know exactly what kind of email I'm talking about.
I never thought I’d say this, but lately a typo almost feels reassuring.
I don't want mistakes, but dang mistakes feel more human right now. They remind me there's an actual person on the other side, thinking in real time instead of handing me something so shiny that it gets fingerprints the second you touch it. Where are all the fingerprints?
So I sat with it for a bit, because this isn't an article about AI slop. I'm not bothered that people are using and experimenting with AI. I use it constantly. What I'm bothered by is how quickly people seem willing to let it speak for them.
The tools are so good now that the machine arrives at an answer before you arrive at an opinion. And I think we're underestimating the cost of that.
Back when we had to write things ourselves, writing was how we figured out what we thought. The struggle to get to a point of view wasn't inefficiency… that was the work and where the texture came from. All those weird edges and the slightly unfinished thoughts and the oddly specific phrase only you would use. The moment where someone over-explains something because they care too much. (hi, it's me 💁🏻♀️) That's the interesting part and that’s what makes things worth reading.
Polish used to signal care and time, thoughtfulness… attention to detail. Now it signals almost nothing. Polish is cheap. Maybe that's what's so unsettling about it.
What I miss the most is access to the person and good prose isn’t enough of a trade. What’s really bothering me is that lately I'm watching some of the smartest people I know become less interesting than they actually are. These are the people whose intellect I'm genuinely jealous of, suddenly phoning it in with a fancy-sounding slide deck. I can almost feel the exact moment they stopped wrestling with the thought and handed it over too early.
At senior levels, this matters more than people realize. Communication isn't just communication anymore. We signal competence and connection through our words. People are reading how you think, what you care about, how you handle nuance and tension—all so that they know how to work with you. I'm not just reading your email. I'm reading you. That becomes a lot harder when every message sounds like poetry.
What makes someone compelling has never been polish, it’s specificity and conviction. Those tiny signals that tell me a real person wrestled with the thought before handing it over.
Come to the tool with a point of view and be willing to fight for it a little. Maybe that's actually the point. What if AI isn't the thing that replaces your thinking, and instead it's the thing that finally forces you to have some?
The bar for showing up with a real point of view just got raised. You can't coast on polish anymore because everyone has access to polish now.
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