I Am Not a Robot

Meet the rule-following writers falsely accused of being chatbots.

- Emma Alpern

WHEN JARED HEWITT’S COWORKER claimed last winter that Hewitt used AI to write an incident report, she did it publicly.

“And I work at a day care, so she was berating me in front of children,” he says. The coworker read the document out loud, pointing to the words juxtaposition and circumstantial as evidence of a machine-generated influence. “I don’t write in a casual way but a much more serious, precise way,” he says. “And I’ve paid the price for living in a ChatGPT society.”

It wasn’t the first time Hewitt’s prose has been pegged as AI, and he thinks he knows why. He has a stutter, and when he’s typing, he can speak uninterrupted. It is a luxury he takes full advantage of: “Once I start writing, I can’t really stop.” Like a chatbot, he goes long. He adds paragraph breaks for posts on Reddit and peppers in research, even when the subject is mundane—say, the actress Willa Fitzgerald’s role in the low-budget 2024 thriller Strange Darling. (“Between Strange Darling and newer projects like A House of Dynamite and Regretting You, her career feels like it’s steadily expanding,” he wrote in a post that one commenter complained was AI generated, “and I have no doubt in my mind that she’ll eventually land the role that finally pushes her fully into the awards circuit, whether in film or television.”) Hewitt is also neurodivergent. “Growing up, I had a strong obsession with writing,” he says. He was always given good grades in English, but now, with the massive uptick in AI-generated text, all the time he spent happily working to improve his prose strikes him as a liability.