There is something exquisitely pathetic about people who deliberately write “i” instead of “I”, misspell perfectly ordinary words, and vandalise their own grammar in the desperate hope of appearing authentically human.

Imagine possessing the accumulated linguistic inheritance of centuries and deciding that the pinnacle of personal expression is to write like a concussed adolescent with a defective keyboard.

These people have achieved something genuinely remarkable: they have made ignorance aspirational. Where civilisation once regarded literacy as an accomplishment, they now parade incompetence as evidence of originality. Apparently, the inability to distinguish a grammatical convention from an AI signature is now considered intellectual discernment.

The irony is delicious. They are so terrified of being mistaken for artificial intelligence that they have voluntarily abandoned the very intelligence they claim to possess.

One might forgive genuine ignorance. It is, after all, an affliction frequently imposed by circumstance. But cultivated stupidity is another matter entirely. To know the rules of language and deliberately butcher them for social approval is not rebellion. It is intellectual self-mutilation performed for an audience of equally enthusiastic imbeciles.

An em dash does not make you a machine. A capital letter does not betray your humanity. And spelling a word correctly is not an admission that a computer has written it.

If your principal method of demonstrating human intelligence is to suppress every visible indication of possessing any, perhaps the problem is not artificial intelligence.

Perhaps it is the embarrassing scarcity of the natural variety.

And... Oh, fuck off if you don’t agree...