“One last time,” I tell myself as I type in, “Make it shorter, more academic; it’s for an assignment.” “It’s a report.” “It’s a presentation.” So many last times, each repeated farewell and goodbye dispersing into the air, so choked with efficiency, perfect mechanical grammar and not a shard of soul.

My eyes gloss over as I type my humanity away, as I sell my meagre abilities for the ever glorious productivity and efficiency and all things shiny. I see the bound copy of the work that I did, of the love that I loved, and in place of pride, I’m filled with a shame I’m sure will only fester. A shame, a crippling disappointment and even more disgust as I realise I’ve claimed for me, myself, words that can never be mine.

I look at my coveted 97/100, and it’s a seething, simmering hatred at the whole circumstance and my utter lack of self-control.

I wipe the hypocrisy off me as I stack up deadlines upon deadlines. I succumb – no, give in, my complicity glaring – to the clever thing to do, which is to work smarter, not harder, and I watch as this AI bot thinks for me and writes for me, ripping my sense of self, one tear at a time, and continues to stuff it with pretty words, with its “delve” and “consequently” and “furthermore“.

“You can humanise it, you know, so it feels less unnatural.” I wait for them to realise how horribly distorted they sound, to backtrack and say how stupidly hypocritical and how redundant it is to trade our identities and our words for this elaborate performance that begins to reek of efficiency and bullet points.

Humanise. Humanise. Humanise. Maybe if I repeat it enough, it might stop being a word. I might sell my soul if it meant it’d stop being a verb.

And yet at the end of the day, I drag my shame and my disgust with me. I carry it and wear it like a tattered cloak of grief as I input my hollow words, half-dead metaphors and broken syllables into one of the numerous AI bots because my free trial ran out elsewhere. “Help me,” I type in, “Help me fix this. It’s due tomorrow.”

And I watch as my humanity ebbs away. I watch with trained eyes as a few lines of code fix my darlings, my beautiful bits of coherence which needed no fixing at all.

The sterility of my betrayal is blinding. I hit ‘Enter’.

- Originally posted on Random Specific Thoughts (December 2025)