yaaI just got back from Easter vacation. A few days off, some quiet, some family, the usual reset. When I opened my inbox, I had let it pile up. That almost never happens. I am the kind of person who reads messages as they come. But this time I didn’t, and coming back to a full inbox turned out to be oddly revealing.
I sat down and read through email after email. And somewhere around the fifth or sixth one, something felt off. Not wrong, exactly. Just… flat. Every message was well-structured. No typos. Logical flow. Clear ask. Professionally signed off. They all looked the same. They felt the same. They had no edges, no texture. No trace of the person who supposedly wrote them.
They had been written by AI. Not all of them, but enough. And I could tell. Not because AI writing is bad. It isn’t. I could tell because there was nothing in those messages that could only have come from that person. No small awkwardness. No slightly odd word choice. No comma in the wrong place that somehow made a sentence feel more human.
Here is the thing about flaws: they are not noise. They are signal. The dyslexic flip of two characters. The sentence that runs a little long because the writer got excited. The grammatical stumble that tells you someone was thinking fast and cared enough to send it anyway. These are not bugs in communication. They are the fingerprints of a real person.
Flawless, in my opinion, is not the same as good. And when everyone’s messages are flawless in exactly the same way, something important disappears. I am not sure I have a word for that yet.
I am using all kinds of AI assistance stuff to help me write this post. I notice the irony. But I want you to notice something too, if you are my colleague, customer, or anyone I do business with. I have a genuine interest in communicating with you, I want to hear from you. Not your Copilot. Not your polished proxy. You. Even if you spell something wrong. Especially if you do.
