That Sounds Like AI: The Last Refuge of the Intellectually Insolvent | by Ryan Locklear @themondayafter | Jul, 2026 | MediumSitemapOpen in appSign up<br>Sign in
Medium Logo
Get app<br>Write
Search
Sign up<br>Sign in
That Sounds Like AI: The Last Refuge of the Intellectually Insolvent
Ryan Locklear @themondayafter
21 min read·<br>Just now
Listen
Share
You were never that good. AI just made it impossible to hide.<br>Press enter or click to view image in full size
AI detection tools have a documented false positive problem. Stanford researchers found that up to 98% of essays written by both native and non-native English speakers were incorrectly flagged as AI-generated by popular detection software.<br>The US average IQ has been declining for nearly two decades, documented in peer-reviewed research as the Reverse Flynn Effect. And yet “that sounds like AI” is being thrown at polished professional writing like it means something.
There is a specific kind of person who, when confronted with writing that is polished, confident, and structurally coherent, will lean back in their chair, squint with the studied authority of someone who has absolutely nothing to contribute, and say it.<br>“That sounds like AI.”<br>Not “here is where I think this argument breaks down.” Not “I’d push back on this point for the following reason.” Just the lazy, evidence-free, intellectually hollow accusation that has become 2026’s preferred substitute for critical thought.<br>I have been a professional writer for over thirty years. I keep an extensive personal law library, a literary library, and a set of Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedias from the 1980’s. And I mean extensive.<br>If you want photographic evidence, check my Facebook.<br>I keep APA, MLA, and the AP Stylebook on my desk. I write handwritten notes that I scan into Google Drive and reference. I have written on cocktail napkins and hotel stationery. I have practiced law, produced media, ran record-breaking digital campaigns, brought a casino to North Carolina, built digital platforms, written over 40 label recorded songs, and published across enough formats that “I’ve been around” is an embarrassing understatement.<br>And yet here we are in 2026, where writing like a professional — with correct grammar, confident structure, and actual rhetorical strategy — apparently reads to a meaningful portion of the internet as evidence of machine generation.<br>Let me be very clear about what that actually tells us. And I promise, it has nothing to do with AI.<br>By the way, prepared to get triggered by a lot of em-dashes and en-dashes. Just so you know, since you’re stupid and you should have learned this in your high school computer class, here are the short codes:<br>Shift+Opt+-; Alt-0151 for em-dashes<br>Opt+-; Alt-0150 for en-dashes
The Insult That Reveals the Insulter<br>In February, Time published a piece on how “that sounds like AI” has become the internet’s preferred new insult.<br>Their reporting was instructive.<br>The accusation, they noted, is rarely about the quality of the writing at all. It is about identity. The suggestion that your voice is generic or interchangeable. It is shorthand for you don’t sound human enough. And it stings not because it is accurate, but because it is designed to dehumanize.<br>Here is what Time diplomatically declined to say. I will not be so polite. Because, frankly, I am pretty freaking pissed off.<br>The people throwing around “AI slop” and “that is AI” as casual dismissals are, in the overwhelming majority of cases, not discerning readers with finely tuned critical instincts. They are people of below-average intelligence operating at the outer edges of their comprehension, who have stumbled across writing that outpaces them and chosen accusation over the considerably more honest response, which would be to say nothing and move on.<br>They are not detecting inauthenticity. They are detecting a gap. The gap between what they are capable of producing and what they just read.<br>And rather than sit with that gap quietly, they have decided to explain it away with a four-word diagnosis that requires exactly zero intellectual effort and carries exactly zero burden of proof.<br>That is what “AI slop” is, stripped of the cultural packaging.<br>It is the rhetorical equivalent of a student who can’t solve the problem writing “this question is unfair” in the margin. It is a stupid person’s power move. And it is effective only on people who are too polite to say that back to them.<br>I am not that polite. I frankly think that anyone who uses that argument is, indeed, stupid themselves.<br>The accusation is almost always deployed by people who have not read the content carefully enough to disagree with a specific point. They haven’t identified a factual error, a logical leap, or a flawed premise. They haven’t engaged with the structure, the sourcing, or the argument at any level that would require them to have an actual position.<br>They have simply encountered writing that sounds more capable than anything they could produce,...