Bryan Cantrill — the Oxide co-founder behind this week’s “Revolt of the Reader” — has a gentler companion piece aimed at LinkedIn. He likes the platform more than he’d like to admit, which is exactly why he’s bothered: too many people whose perspectives he wants to hear are letting AI write their posts, nudged along by LinkedIn’s cheerful “rewrite it with AI” button.
His case that machine prose is instantly spotted:
- The tells are stylistic — emoji clutter, single-sentence paragraphs, the “it’s not just X, but also Y” construction, em-dashes that most writers never earned
- Anyone who has seen much AI text recognizes it immediately: “your intellectual fly is open — lots of people notice, but no one is pointing it out”
- The cost isn’t embarrassment, it’s trust: when he can’t tell a person’s real thoughts from generated filler, he stops reading, and so do others
Cantrill isn’t anti-tool. AI models are, he says, superb for brainstorming, for making sense of difficult text, and as editors you can safely ignore. What they can’t do is be you — at best they flatten your voice into skimmable patterns, at worst they make readers question whether anything you post is real.
The advice is the meat-proxy lesson applied to social writing: have confidence in your own voice and write your own words. Readers can tell the difference, and the ones worth reaching reward it with attention.