It’s Just a Word, Until It Isn’t

It is October, and as we celebrate Black History and reflect on what it means to be black, I’ve been thinking about the strange parallels between how we stereotype people and how we’re beginning to stereotype writing itself.

Some time in 2024, Paul Graham made a post on X that whenever he sees the word “delve”, he automatically assumes the text is AI-generated. Since then, others have become more vocal about so-called “AI giveaway words” like ensure, em dashes, or the phrase “it’s not just about X, it’s about Y”.

At first, the assumptions sounded harmless, but it didn’t take long for those jokes to harden into judgment. Suddenly, people started throwing accusations at any well-written piece of text, as though good writing itself is now a crime. With many failing to see that we’ve started treating certain words, styles, and tones as signs of inauthenticity, as if humans can no longer write articulately.

...this no doubt to me mirrors something deeper.

I’d like to believe that while some people are simply naive, many who make these sweeping judgments often have a limited vocabulary or don’t read enough. I try to forgive that, after all, we didn’t all grow up reading the dictionary.

However, what I can’t ignore is how our minds, consciously or unconsciously, hold on to ideas and quietly build prejudice around them. For instance, even though I disagree with Paul Graham’s comment, I still catch myself thinking of it whenever I see delve. And that’s coming from me who disagrees. What about the audience that echoes rhetoric without question, especially when it comes from “industry voices”?

Are they entirely wrong? No. But are they right? Also no.

The weight of familiar patterns

Maybe this is also a sensitive topic for me, because I’ve seen this pattern my whole life, just in different forms.

As an African and Nigerian, I’ve heard an earful of stereotypes about my race and nationality, and every day I keep hearing more. Some of it is cruel; some of it hides behind “harmless jokes.” Either way, I’m tired of people attributing behavior, language, or intention to someone because of a handful of samples they’ve interacted with.

These days, I see people moving along with stereotypes because they think, “It’s not that bad,” or “Not me, so not my problem.” We’ve turned the stereotypes into “well, it is one of those things, if I pretend not to care, eventually people will stop”, as if that has ever stopped anyone. Forgetting that every time we allow a lazy narrative to spread unchecked, we build new layers of prejudice.

As a person of colour, I’ve also seen campaigns like “I Am Not My Stereotype” created to challenge the boxes society loves to put us in. But at the rate things are going, writers might soon need their own version to combat the budding plague in the literary world and to remind people that not every well-crafted sentence is the work of a machine.

As being Black and Nigerian doesn’t automatically make me a criminal or a prince(ss), using em dashes doesn’t make my writing AI-generated.

That’s why I refuse to stay silent when someone makes unfounded claims about another person’s writing style. Because prejudice, whether racial or linguistic, always starts small—a word here, a look there, a quiet assumption that goes unchallenged.

Every bias begins with a simple judgment we fail to question. We internalize these things, consciously and unconsciously, until they start shaping how we act, who we believe, and who we dismiss.

I fear that very soon, if we’re not careful, we’ll spend more time judging how people write—we already judge accents and skin color—than actually listening to what they’re trying to say.