If you've spent any length of time on the internet in the last five years, you've read AI-generated writing. Or as it's affectionately called, "AI slop".
You'll have noticed it—not through the em dash, but through the staccato, rhythmless writing that's so prevalent these days.
But what is it exactly that makes AI writing so ... soulless? So off-putting?
Reading through "The Inner Game of Tennis" (a great book, btw), I put my finger on it.
In this book, Gallwey is trying to put his finger on exactly what it is in the mind that gets in the way of being a good tennis player. He settles on the idea that there are two systems of thought active in our brains (this is born out by modern neuroscience—see "The Master and His Emissary")—self 1, the conscious "task-master" type, rigid, controlled, and "in-charge"; and self 2, the unconsciously competent doer of actions. If you've ever had a password you've forgotten, only later to remember it through being in the same place and simply entering it, you've met selves 1 and 2.
In Gallwey's conception, flow and fluidity—two keys to playing tennis well, but really to all high-performance—result from inhibiting self 1. "Trying harder" never works, because, as he writes, it splits the fluid motion into individual parts (the backswing, the follow-through, etc) and those individual parts can't be put back together again.
The same is true with AI writing. AI is all self 1 and no self 2, all mechanical and staccato, no unconscious competence and flow, all notes, no rhythm.
It works in units, not wholes. It doesn't see the gestalt face but rather breaks it up into constituent parts—a nose, a mouth, ears.
This is why it's so jarring for us to read AI writing, why it sticks out like a soulless sore thumb—writing is the process of pouring your soul out on to the page, opening the lid and sharing the contents of your mind. When that mind is fragmented, the writing becomes nightmarish, a bizzaro, Frankensteinian replication.