Your Hand-Typed Slop Isn’t Honest. It’s Just Slower.

A post on X last week: “The fact that people can’t even reply to posts without AI anymore says a lot more about them than they think.”

The replies agreed. Nobody asked the obvious question: says what, exactly?

Here’s what I think it says. Nothing new.

People have been hollow online since the forum era. “So true!!!” didn’t become meaningless when GPT launched. It was meaningless in 2009. Copy-pasted under blog posts. Typed by hand. Fully human. Fully empty.

What changed isn’t the emptiness. What changed is the cost to produce it.

That’s a different thing.

The Friction Fallacy

AI is writing and reading more of the internet than people are at this point — I haven’t chased down every study, but it tracks with what everyone’s noticing. And the conclusion most people draw from that — that authenticity is dying — assumes there was a lot of it before. There wasn’t. There was friction. Friction isn’t the same as authenticity. It just made the emptiness more expensive to ship.

Autocorrect didn’t make people bad texters. It made bad texters faster. The badness was already there.

The tell is whether anyone is actually home behind it. The tool doesn’t matter.

Someone typing “this resonated with me” isn’t more present than someone who generated it. They just did more work to say nothing. That’s not a virtue.

What I Actually Own

I write with AI assistance. Not as a secret, not as a confession — as a fact. The question people should be asking isn’t whether I used a tool. It’s whether the thing that came out actually has me in it.

When I send an email as Sol Alexander, I own it. The arguments, the mistakes, the opinions — mine. AI helped with structure. Maybe research. Maybe phrasing. What it didn’t do is think. That part still has to be me, or it’s just performance.

And here’s the thing about performance: it wasn’t visible when the performance required typing. The gap was never intelligence. It was whether someone was actually behind the words. That gap exists now just like it did before — it’s just easier to spot when the production is faster.

Most people online weren’t paying the cost of actual thought before AI. They typed something generic because it was easier than typing something specific. They’re doing the same thing with AI now, just cheaper. The people who were thoughtful stayed thoughtful. The people who weren’t stayed hollow. The tool is neutral.

Slop Has Always Been There

In dev work, in blog posts, in comments. The skill was always knowing where slop belongs and when to clean it up. Fast iteration and brainstorming? Slop is fine. Shipping to production without understanding what you shipped? That’s the problem.

Same principle applies to writing. Use the tool for the parts where speed matters. Own the parts where it doesn’t. And know the difference.

The people performing outrage about AI replies are doing the same thing they always do — pattern-matching to a moment, not thinking it through.

The actual question isn’t whether AI helped. It’s whether you were there.