When good writing starts looking like AI

New York Magazine. Her piece moved from a day-care worker mocked for words like “juxtaposition” and “circumstantial” to a Moroccan writer accused within minutes of submitting work, to a business professor raised across Asia who said the English textbooks he learned from had given him precisely the kind of vocabulary people now associate with ChatGPT. The writers with autism she spoke to said this was not new.

They had been told they sounded robotic long before there was any chatbot to blame. One novelist put it plainly: people are now “going off vibes”.There is now at least one study trying to test that pattern. A 2025 conference paper by Summer Chambers and Matthew C.

Kelley ran the OpenAI GPT-2 detector over roughly 60,000 Reddit posts, split between a “likely-autistic” corpus and a general Reddit corpus. The overall flagging rates were low in both groups. That matters.

The paper does not say that most writing by people with autism gets flagged as AI. It does say the likely-autistic corpus was flagged significantly more often, and it argues that using such detectors in academic settings deserves ethical scrutiny.You do not need autism in the frame to see the wider problem. These systems are probabilistic.

They guess. But in classrooms, editorial inboxes and review processes, those guesses start acting like verdicts. Formal vocabulary, clean syntax and the visible care of someone writing in a second or third language can all begin to look suspicious.In India, that absurdity has a particular sting.

Polished English is not some suspicious luxury here. It is often the product of years of correction. Memorise the rule.

Do not split the infinitive. Do not drop the article. Do not write as you speak.