When personal computers arrived in the eighties, everyone went a little crazy with fonts. A bake-sale flyer might have five different typefaces on it. It looked like a kidnapping threat. But to the person making it, it felt like possibility.

We are doing the same thing with AI now. The internet is filling up with writing that is perfectly polished, grammatically flawless, and utterly hollow. Fast fashion for the mind. It looks like a suit. It fits like a suit. But it is empty.

Compare these two dedications.

1. “When I think about my mother there is a direct bodily sensation. In my throat and in my heart muscle. Any text that I could write would be lesser than the silence surrounding her.”
2. “To my mother, who gave me the roots to grow and the wings to fly.”

Which one is written by a human and which one by AI?

The first is by a human writer. The AI version gives the shape of feeling without the feeling itself. A photograph of a fire that gives no heat.

The AI has never had a specific mother. It has read about mothers. It has processed ten million dedications and extracted the pattern. What it cannot do is sit with the specific ache — the one in the throat, the one in the heart muscle — and let that ache speak without dressing it up.

Photography did not kill painting. It liberated it. Once the camera could capture the fact of a face, the painter was free to capture the feeling of it. They stopped painting where the shadows fell and started painting how the light felt. They invented Impressionism.

AI is doing the same thing to writing. It has taken over the utilitarian work — the grammar, the transitions, finding background info. It has liberated the writer to do the one thing that matters most: be himself.

As it turns out, that is the one job AI are not very good at.