Perfection as a Trust Killer

When ChatGPT came out it became our new family member. We asked it questions and had it write texts. Access to knowledge was suddenly easier than ever. I was excited.

The hangover came a few months later.

The output language was too tempting. Everything there and perfectly formulated. But my inner knife for getting to the bottom of things and cutting through the thicket of information went dull. I didn’t have to struggle anymore. The machine delivered and I nodded along.

After a while I noticed that everything sounded the same. The same phrases, the same pseudo-cleverness with a slime trail that said: Look how smart I sound. And I realized that my own texts were starting to sound the same way.

At some point I stopped handing my language over to the machine.

Since then I notice AI language everywhere. In about pages and corporate positioning statements. Polished formulations that sound smarter than the person behind them could ever write. And it’s not just the texts that obviously come from the machine. It’s the language itself that has spread. People repeat it, even without a script. The post-buzzword language is AI babble.

My problem with it isn’t that the texts are bad. My problem is that I can no longer tell whether someone thought for themselves. Whether there’s a person who struggled with a thought. Or whether someone typed a prompt and copied the result.

Without that feeling there’s no trust. Trust comes when you sense that someone stands behind their words. That the words might be rough but someone behind them actually thought about it. AI language removes exactly that.

I’m not accusing anyone. I noticed it in myself first. The temptation is real. I understand everyone who gives in to it. But I’ve decided to take the slower path. To write and think for myself.

Of course I use AI tools. I write in German and a translation tool transfers that into English. Not word for word but in a way that preserves what I’m saying. The AI recognizes what I mean and finds the right tone in another language. That’s useful. But the thought it’s supposed to translate — that one I have to have myself.