AI-Free Is the New Black
9 July 2026
A normal session of doomscrolling today can feel like walking through The Truman Show. One news clip after another is narrated by AI anchors with perfect enunciation and frictionless pacing. Posts arrive pre-polished, advertisements look machine-rendered, captions read as if assembled by the same invisible mastermind—and even the occasional slippage of human-made content tends to concern FOMO in the AI era. After a while, one starts to feel paranoid about the sleek machine flavour and the pristine 'perfection' that comes with it, and to pine for idiosyncrasies and blemishes: the occasional yet amusing slips of the tongue, the bloopers, the odd choices of words, and the jokes that prove a little too sharp and coarse to appear in AI-mediated content.
If you find yourself inadvertently distracted by the emdash and colon in the opening exhibit, congrats on having the potential to become an sleuth of AI crimes. Unfortunately, it is not AI-written. In furtherance of self-exoneration, an opening exhibit like this, on a supposedly professional AI researcher's website, would effortlessly trigger an LLM's defence system by being risky, irrational, and anticlimactic.
To cut to the chase, just as counter-urbanisation emerged as a natural consequence of urbanisation, my humble prediction is that when the current zeal for AI subsides there will be a new trend of advocating for and adopting AI-free practices. In many cases, it is already happening.
It is not so much a question of agency. When one has read, been fed, and actively produced a plethora of AI slop, recognising it becomes almost second nature. The 'em-dash paranoia' and the subsequnet conscious expurgation of the mark, are precise symptoms of this—yet disastrous for admirers of writers like Zadie Smith, who have a penchant for the quaint, provocative cadence this punctuation mark brings to a sentence. Whether you like it or not, AI has been polluting our senses and the landscapes around us. Economists have a name for this: network externalities. In this case, literal ones.
Some advanced economies have shown great prescience in preparing for the AI revolution. In South Korea, tutors had started giving workshops by early 2020 on how to ace an AI interview—which words should come out of your mouth, how you should smile, how you should blink. The level of insanity is astounding.
I suspect there will soon be a badge—'100% human'—to honour those who still deliver the product themselves where AI has automated the entire supply chain. And they will still find customers, just as handmade goods remain a staple of an industrialised society.
Looking forward to the day when AI-free is the new black.