If ChatGPT rewrites my messages, is it still “me” to the reader?

My brother works in the movie industry (an animator and illustrator by trade) and he often writes film reviews for fun on Facebook. For years his grammar was atrocious, unapologetic, and admittedly embarrassing to me as his brother. It was common for me to jokingly call him out on this in the comments. His mind was faster than his fingers. Regardless, he got people engaging because he’s a good film critic. Very insightful. However, his Facebook engagement has recently dwindled. The difference? He suddenly started using AI to scrub all his reviews and the community could tell. At first, it was refreshing to get through a review at a third of the usual time but I too could tell — it was too “chatty”. I was wrong to critique him before because it turns out people missed his word scrabbles and grammatical puzzles when decoding each movie review.

As time goes on, I notice how more and more people have perfect grammar and composition. It seems AI, the new Spellcheck Paperclip, is to blame for this paradigm shift in prose. For me, it’s getting easier to sniff out when AI wrote something and it feels somewhat unauthentic. I too face this problem. What’s my cure — which you didn’t ask? Bad grammar.

Bad grammar has become part of texting and email vernacular — often forgvien by the reader and at times unnoticed because our eyes naturally unscramble the letters almost immediately when a word is misspelled. This is officially known as Typoglycemia or the Transposed Letter Effect, a phenomenon where individuals can still read words despite the letters in the middle being jumbled, provided the first and last letters stay in the right places.

I’ve personally continue to train my chatGPT to write or rewrite my messages in my tone. It’s getting more and more authentic sounding but it’s still not good at adding typos, repeating contractions, or mixing in the kind of grammatical faux pas I actually make. We’re both still learning. I always double check how it sounds.

My brother and I may have found a leak in the boat when it comes to writing posts, emails, texts, and alike — less chatty equals more natty.

Maybe the fix is simple: don’t sand down every edge. Let it be rough sometimes and give visual splinters. Let people hear your actual voice between the paragraphs AI tries to clean.

So – Do people think it’s actually me? I hope so.., but my spelling could use some work.

Disclosure: the chatGPT prompts I used after writing this…

• Rewrite in my tone to a tee.
• I want to see minimal changes.
• Do not fix any misspellings or grammatical errors.