Ilwyn Patterson didn’t expect her outreach message to raise suspicions. She had spotted a promising contact on LinkedIn someone who could help promote her startup-focused event. Her message was short, clean, and to the point:
“I run a biannual demo day that reaches 4,000 startups a year, one of which I noticed is also in your program. We also have a 15k-plus founder, VC, and angel investor newsletter. There seems to be a natural crossover between our communities. It'd be great to share opportunities with each other.”
The reply? Not thanks, not interest but an accusation:
“Very impressive AI-driven outreach.”
Patterson was stunned. She took pride in her concise, polished communication. Confused and a bit insulted, she turned to her LinkedIn network with a public post:
“To anyone who thought I was a bot, I (humanly) apologise. I’m just a confused human trying to write some emails.”
The reaction she received opened a floodgate of similar experiences and unearthed a new kind of professional anxiety:
“Imbotster Syndrome.”
What Is Imbotster Syndrome?
Coined as a play on “imposter syndrome,” imbotster syndrome is the creeping fear that your writing might be mistaken for AI-generated text. It’s become especially common on platforms like LinkedIn, where professional polish is both expected and increasingly distrusted.
“AI is now a specter hanging over everything we write,” says Annette Vee, an English professor at the University of Pittsburgh who studies writing and technology.
Vee compares the pervasiveness of AI-generated content to microplastics:
“Whether you realize it or not, and whether you're using it or not, it's already in the bloodstream.”
LinkedIn itself estimates that over 50% of its long-form posts are now AI-generated. But without a way to clearly differentiate between bot and human output, the result is growing suspicion even toward genuinely human-authored writing.
The New Writing Witch Hunt
Across Reddit and LinkedIn, users share lists of “AI tells”:
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Cliché phrases like “in today’s fast-paced world”
What used to be solid writing advice is now a liability.
Take Cheril Clarke, a professional ghostwriter for healthcare and finance execs. She uses AI tools to brainstorm and draft then rewrites content manually to fit her clients’ voice. But now, she adds a final step: purging anything that might make the writing sound too much like AI.
“AI writes like it’s running a marathon at the same pace the whole time,” she says. “That’s not how humans speak or write.”
She’s cut the em-dash, triplet list rhythm, and even the rhetorical contrast structure not because they’re bad, but because they’ve become overexposed. What once made writing impactful now reads as algorithmic.
How the AI Panic Is Changing Our Writing
The backlash has led some professionals to intentionally degrade their writing to sound more human. Skipping commas, using slang, and even inserting typos have become signs of authenticity.
“Polish has become a liability, and the typo has turned into a kind of authenticity badge,” says Casey Fiesler, an information science professor at the University of Colorado Boulder.
In a strange twist, the more careful and grammatically correct you are, the more likely you are to be accused of being a bot.
After being accused of AI authorship, Patterson and her team began experimenting with more human-sounding DMs. One suggestion? Opening with “Hope all good.” Ultimately, they rejected it.
“I don’t think if I got a message that said ‘Hope all good’ I’d go, yep, definitely human,” Patterson quipped.
The Uncomfortable Reality: We All Sound Like AI Now
Here’s the twist: AI didn’t invent this style it learned it from us.
The language now flagged as robotic the earnest tone, the inspirational punchlines, the crisp formatting was born in corporate offices, honed through millions of press releases, PowerPoint decks, and LinkedIn posts. AI just mimicked the blueprint we gave it.
That’s why it’s so difficult to distinguish human writing from AI. Most of the time, the suspect text is simply good corporate writing and humans have been doing that for decades.
“There’s a general assumption that you can tell whether something is written by AI,” Vee says. “I think that’s not right.”
Style, Suspicion, and the Future of Communication
This isn’t just about tone it’s about credibility. Writers, marketers, founders, and executives are stuck in a new performance: trying to appear unmistakably human.
Some lean into casual messiness. Others over-correct and appear robotic. But both camps now write in AI’s shadow second-guessing every punctuation mark, stylistic choice, or rhetorical flourish.
Vee sums it up best:
“You can’t make any writerly decision without taking AI into account at this point. You’re either avoiding it or leaning into it but it’s always there.”
Trust, Not Just Text, Is the New Goal
In a strange new twist of professional life, sounding “too perfect” can cost you trust. Whether you use AI or not, the pressure to prove your humanity in writing is shaping how we communicate.
The corporate voice once a symbol of clarity and competence now reads as synthetic. And in a world where everything sounds like it might’ve been written by ChatGPT, we’re all stuck in the same game: showing just enough imperfection to sound real.
Or, as ChatGPT itself might put it:
“The more flawless your style, the more suspicious it looks. And in the end, not clarity but credibility is the ultimate goal.”
