AI has managed to do something rather unexpected: it is making people afraid of sounding like themselves. As detection tools such as Pangram increasingly influence debates over whether a piece of writing was created by a human or a chatbot, authors and students are changing their language to avoid raising suspicion. That means fewer familiar writing habits, more deliberate imperfections and, in some cases, people second-guessing perfectly ordinary sentences.

A Bloomberg report has highlighted how AI detection has moved beyond catching machine-generated content. It is now influencing the way people write, even when they claim they have never used AI.

Writers are changing their style to avoid sounding like ChatGPT

One of the most striking examples involves novelist Mia Ballard, whose book Shy Girl was withdrawn by publisher Hachette in March after it received a 78.3% AI-written score from Pangram.…