By Eve Fairbanks
Publication Date: 2026-05-29 11:00:00
A few weeks ago where I live in Johannesburg, a man ran a stop sign and crashed into my Subaru. At the crime scene he was unable to organize his thoughts. Half an hour later, I received a long, perfectly grammatical text from him in which he elegantly explained how he had perceived the accident. For a repair quote, I wrote to a mechanic I knew, a man who always texted me in short sentences full of shorthand. I received a response in the same voice as the man who had crashed into me – the unmistakable voice of the AI.
In surveys, people repeatedly say that they distrust AI-generated writing. But that’s stopped more and more of us from using it in everyday life—to write work emails and personal texts, to make shopping lists, and even to write scripts for arguments with our spouses. “I feel like I’m going crazy,” complained author Jason Koebler in the tech magazine 404 Media, under “the cognitive strain” of trying to tell whether every text he reads is real or…
