I received a condolence note last week that I am almost certain a machine wrote, and I have not stopped thinking about it.
The words were correct. They had the right shape — a memory of the person who died, a line about how she always made a room warmer, a closing wish that I take care of myself in the weeks ahead. Nothing was misspelled. Nothing was wrong. And yet reading it felt like biting into wax fruit. Everything my eye expected was there, and there was nothing inside.
I can't prove it. That's the part that keeps me up. A year ago I would have read that note and felt held. Now I read every kind sentence with one eyebrow raised, running it through a private little detector that asks: did a person reach for this, or did a person reach for a button that reached for this? The note may well have been written by hand, late at night, by someone who loved her. But the doubt is new, and the doubt is the whole story.
The mint never closes
Think of words as money. For most of human history, the supply was tight. Writing a paragraph that read well took effort — you had to know things, arrange them, find the word that fit and discard the four that didn't. The effort was the backing. When someone sent you a real letter, the cost they paid in time and attention was the gold in the vault behind the note. You could feel its weight.
What happened in the last eighteen months is that we built a mint that never closes and handed everyone the keys. The marginal cost of a fluent paragraph has fallen to roughly nothing. Type a prompt, get a wedding toast, a resignation letter, a sympathy card, a strategy memo, a love poem in the style of whoever you like. The output is grammatical, warm, structured, and instant. By every surface measure it is good writing.
And here is the thing about a mint that never closes. When you can print without limit, the printing tells you nothing. Inflation is not a metaphor I'm using for color. It is the literal mechanism. The value of a unit of fluent prose is collapsing because the supply has gone vertical, and value, in words as in money, is a function of scarcity.
We are about to live through the devaluation of competent writing the way a country lives through the devaluation of its currency — gradually, then in a rush, with everyone pretending for a while that the old prices still hold.
What fluency used to mean
For a long time, fluent writing was a proxy for something underneath it. A clear memo suggested a clear thinker. A graceful letter suggested someone who cared enough to be graceful. A well-argued essay suggested a mind that had actually done the arguing. We read the surface and trusted it to report on the depths, because producing the surface required the depths. You generally couldn't fake the prose without first having the thought.
That link is now cut. The surface can be manufactured with no depths behind it at all. The cover letter no longer tells you the candidate can write; it tells you the candidate can prompt, which is a different and much smaller thing. The fluent grant proposal no longer signals a careful researcher. The polished apology no longer signals genuine remorse — it may signal that someone wanted the appearance of remorse badly enough to outsource it.
Orwell, writing about political language in 1946, complained that ready-made phrases let people produce sentences without thinking — that the prose came pre-assembled and the writer merely snapped the parts together, like a kit. He called it the substitution of "ready-made phrases" for "freshly coined" ones. He was worried about clichés. We have built the industrial version of his nightmare: a machine that snaps the parts together perfectly, in any register, faster than you can decide whether you mean it. The kit now assembles itself.
The signature is the scarce thing
Here is where I land, and I want to be careful, because it would be easy to turn this into a lament about authenticity, which is a word that has already been printed into worthlessness.
When the words themselves cost nothing, the scarce and valuable thing is no longer the words. It is the willingness to stand behind them. It is signature — not the squiggle at the bottom, but the act of attaching your name and your standing to a claim, in a way that costs you something if the claim is empty.
A bank note used to be worth something because gold sat behind it. When we cut that cord, the note kept its value only because an institution stood behind it and could be held to account. Cheap words will work the same way. A sentence will be worth reading not because it is fluent — fluency is free now — but because someone has put their reputation behind it and will pay a price if it turns out to be hollow.
You already feel this happening, even if you haven't named it. You trust the friend whose texts are clumsy but unmistakably hers over the acquaintance whose every message reads like a press release. You skim the perfectly structured report and read closely the messy one with a real number in it that someone could be wrong about. You have started, without deciding to, to value friction. The typo is becoming a watermark. The hedge a machine wouldn't think to write is becoming proof of life.
What this does to those of us who build
I run a company now, and I think about this constantly, because we are in the business of putting machines to work and the temptation is everywhere. It would be easy to let the mint run — to let every email, every proposal, every word that touches a customer come out of the machine, fluent and infinite and free.
The mistake is to treat the machine's output as the product. It isn't. The output is abundant, and abundant things are cheap. The product is the judgment about what to say, what to refuse to say, and whose name goes on it. The machine can write a hundred versions of the apology. Deciding which one is true, and being willing to be held to it — that part does not get cheaper. If anything it gets dearer, because it is now the only part that's scarce.
So the discipline I'm trying to build, in the company and in myself, is narrow and a little old-fashioned. Use the machine to clear the underbrush — the boilerplate, the third draft, the formatting nobody should spend a life on. But never let it stand in the place where meaning is supposed to go. When something matters, pay the cost. Write the worse sentence that you mean over the better one that you don't.
There is a near future, I think, where the most valuable writers are not the most fluent ones. Fluency will be a commodity, sold by the token. The valuable ones will be the people who can be trusted to mean it — whose words are backed, who pay when they're wrong, who write less and risk more. The premium will sit on conviction, not craft. We are not used to that. We have spent a century rewarding polish. The polish is about to be free.
I still don't know who wrote that condolence note. But I know what I'll do differently. The next time someone I love loses someone, I'm going to write the clumsy thing by hand, the specific memory that no machine could have, the sentence that proves a person was actually there. It will read worse than what the machine would produce. That's exactly why it will be worth something.
When everyone can print, the only currency left is the one you can't counterfeit: the cost of meaning what you say.