000015 — Artificialization

Last week, I was in an Uber and saw a major brand running a big, expensive billboard. The copy was fine. Clean. Structured. On message. And it felt like it could have been for anything. No fingerprints. No sense that someone had lived with the product, argued about the line, or cared how it landed.

That’s the thing I’m noticing: more and more words are technically correct, and less and less of them feel like they came from a particular person.

I’ve spent a lot of time on the opposite side of the process. Writers’ rooms. Late night content and copy brainstorming sessions. The weird little creative caves where nothing is precious until suddenly one line is. You look at the same product from ten angles. You say the sentence out loud and see if it lands. You argue about one word for twenty minutes. You hold the thing in your hand. You sit with engineers who know the product down to the code level. Then you drive home, and you’re still thinking about the copy because you can feel the difference between a line that is true and a line that is just… there.

That process is messy and fun and surprisingly human.

So when I see language that feels manufactured, I’m not trying to be dramatic about it. I recognize the smell. If you spend enough time around these models, you start recognizing their fingerprints. Not because you’re hunting plagiarism, but because when you’ve spent time with the originals, you can recognize real and REAL has a texture to it.

And then, because I’m me, I went down a vintage ads rabbit hole when I arrived at the hotel.

Old Porsche ads were alive. One said, “Didn’t your doctor tell you to get more fresh air?” and it’s selling a 911 Cabriolet like it’s medicine. Another one: “Look at it this way. It’s either an expensive sports car or a very reasonable race car.” That line has personality. It has risk. It assumes the reader is smart enough to play along.

One more because this was my favorite: an old BMW ad said, “Now you don’t have to trade in your family to own a sports car.” It knew exactly who it was talking to. It’s funny and clear and textured, and it’s also not afraid of being wordy. Those ads were willing to explain. Willing to make a case. Willing to have an opinion.

And now so much of what we consume feels like it has been run through the same machine. Summarized. Sanded. Optimized. Perfectly packaged.

Perfectly the same.

That sameness is what keeps getting under my skin.

You see it on LinkedIn, social media, and increasingly in news articles. The patterns are basically wearing name tags at this point. Same hook. Same cadence. Same “here’s what I learned.” Same tidy bow on the end. And it’s not even that people are copying each other. It’s that everyone is pulling from the same invisible mold.

You see it in brand content too. Blog posts that exist purely to feed ranking machines. Marketing copy that sounds like it was assembled from ten sources and lived in, understood by none of them. YouTube videos where ten creators all sound like they’re reading the same script. Billboards like the ones I saw recently in San Francisco that make you wonder if anyone involved has ever actually touched or logged into the product they’re advertising, or looked at the billboard 1 mile down the highway.

And weirdly, you start hearing it in conversations. People adopting the same linguistic structure. The same polished therapy language. The same “I want to acknowledge” cadence. Even when the person is sincere, the shape starts to feel pre fabricated.

It’s like the game of telephone. Someone tells a model something. The model flattens it into something that looks good. Someone else copies the shape. Then the shape becomes the standard. Then the standard becomes the expectation. Then we’re all speaking inside a template and calling it authenticity.

I’ve been calling it Language Artificialization.

Taking something organic and original and accelerating it into a manufactured version that can be produced at scale. Like food. Like flavoring. Like “strawberry” that has never been near a strawberry.

There are benefits. Speed is useful. Efficiency is useful. Scale is useful. We live in a world that runs on velocity, and people are busy, and attention is scarce, and I get why everyone wants a machine that can help.

And I also think there’s a tradeoff we’re pretending isn’t real.

Communication used to be a craft. Now it’s becoming a transaction.

And when communication becomes a transaction, the human part gets removed first. Not in some dramatic sci fi way, quietly. The part that makes you feel like you’re in contact with another person.

This matters to me because I care about craft. I’ve always cared about it in products, in design, in cars, in spaces, in the little details that make something feel intentional instead of mass produced. And now I’m stepping into writing in a real way, which is funny if you’ve known me a long time, because I never thought of myself as a writer. Writing used to be something I did to survive, or process, or make sense of chaos. It wasn’t something I did because it was enjoyable.

And lately I’m actually enjoying it.

That’s new.

It’s changing me. It’s giving me nuance. It’s giving me language. It’s giving me a way to live that feels more awake. So yeah, I’m becoming a self proclaimed craftsman, and I’m protective of craft because I can feel how rare it is getting.

It also matters because discernment matters. I want to be able to tell what’s real and what’s manufactured, because leadership requires it. If I can’t discern real from synthetic, I will make bad decisions. I will be misled. I will trust things that are hollow. Hollow things are expensive, even when they’re free.

And then there’s the capital world lens, which has its own weird parallel. When signal gets diluted, bad bets increase. When everything looks polished, it gets harder to see what’s true. If we normalize synthetic signal everywhere, we should expect downstream consequences.

That is the same temptation I feel in my own writing. I want to write a book badly, and if I wanted to, I could make one look done quickly. Models can produce coherence all day. That is not the hard part.

The hard part is wrestling the tangled web in my brain into a story that has integrity. Choosing what belongs and what does not. Sitting with a thought long enough for it to earn its way into language. Keeping the imperfections that make it human.

So maybe the practice is not “never use AI.” That is performative and unrealistic and also misses the point. The practice is knowing exactly what I will and will not hand over.

Write down how you use it. What you will not use it for. Then revisit those rules, because convenience is persuasive and the slope is slippery and scope creep is quiet.

Also, please know, this is as much a note to myself, because I can feel the temptation even as I write this, as Grammarly is giving me suggestions with each sentence, that polish what I am trying to say, and well it does a great job, but it’s also removing rawness and uniqueness. I have to remind myself, “Darryl, this is not an academic paper; enjoy the freedom of just writing.”

One of the most interesting things about real intelligence, human or machine, is that it can make a move that isn’t expected. It can surprise you. It can take a risk. It can put a little chaos in the right place. AlphaGo did that. It made counter normative moves that looked wrong until they proved to be brilliant.

That’s what taste is. Taste is knowing when to break the pattern.

So this is me trying to become more intentional about pattern, and more willing to keep what’s imperfect, and more committed to craft, and more serious about originality, and less interested in perfectly polished content that could have been written by anyone.

I want the book to be real.

Not a half written manuscript sitting in a folder. Not a pile of notes with good intentions. A real thing with pages. A spine. Dog eared corners. A few sentences that someone underlines because it felt like contact.

And the only way I know how to get there is to keep building with sentences, paragraphs, and this growing collection of field notes that still have fingerprints in them.