We have always been uneasy about whether the person presenting themselves to us is actually there. LinkedIn did not invent that. The performance of professional life has been running for a long time.

COVID pulled the curtain back briefly. Backgrounds appeared. Dogs wandered into calls. People started saying true things — that they were tired, that they were scared, that they were trying to make dinner and also hold a job and also be a person. The dividing wall between professional and human came down, and it turned out most people preferred it that way.

Then we returned. And then came AI.

What AI did was turn up the volume on a question we were already asking quietly: is this real? Now it has a villain. The em dash. The cadence. The structure. Someone in the comments, triumphant: a machine wrote this. Everyone feels they have learned something important.

I'm not sure they have.

The trust crisis is real. But it predates any tool, and it will outlast whatever the next detection method is. The question worth asking is not did something help you write this. It is is there a person here, and do they mean it?

Those are different questions. And usually, when you sit across from someone and go one layer deeper, you can tell.