i am being replaced before i even began.

I'm so tired.

Recently, one of my university assignments was flagged as 97% AI generated, which was a bit of a shock considering I am probably one of the most vocal anti-AI people in my course. If I was going to spend three years studying journalism only to let ChatGPT write my assignments for me, I could have saved myself the HECS debt.

This whole thing would almost be funny if it wasn't sitting on top of a much larger anxiety that I think a lot of budding writers are carrying around right now.

When I started university, AI was just beginning to become a concern. It existed, sure, but it still felt like something experimental. Most people were treating it like a novelty rather than an inevitability. Fast forward a few years and it feels impossible to escape. Every platform has AI integrated into it. Every company is trying to convince me their AI feature is going to revolutionise my life. Every week another creative industry gets told to adapt or die because a machine can now produce a cheaper imitation of what humans have spent decades learning to do.

I know people roll their eyes when so-called “creatives” talk about AI because there is this assumption that we're all being dramatic or resistant to change, but I don't think that's what this is.

What bothers me is watching people outsource the very things that make them human. Somewhere along the way we collectively decided that creativity, expression, communication, and critical thinking were inconvenient tasks rather than worthwhile experiences. Students use AI to summarise readings, write discussion board posts, generate assignment structures, draft emails, create presentations, and increasingly write entire assessments. At some point I find myself wondering why we're even here anymore. Why accumulate thousands of dollars of HECS debt if we cannot be bothered engaging with the material ourselves? What exactly are we paying for if the machine is doing the learning on our behalf?

I don’t care if that’s hard to hear, if you are using AI; you aren’t learning.

Writing has always felt intensely personal to me, which is probably why being flagged upset me more than I expected. Every time I sit down to write something, whether it's an essay, an article, a blog post, or a half-finished document I abandon at two in the morning, I feel like I am creating a small caricature of myself on the page. Not a perfect representation, obviously. More like an exaggerated sketch. A version of myself made up entirely of sentence structure, word choice, and whatever obsession has hijacked my brain that week. This particular writing has drawn my attention off of my Eurovision piece (stay tuned) which… Everyone who knows me personally understands how big of a deal that is. Every piece of writing contains traces of the person who created it. The way they think. The way they argue. The way they see the world.

That has always been the appeal of writing for me. Long before I cared about journalism as a profession, I cared about writing because it felt like one of the purest forms of human connection. You sit alone in a room, arrange words in a particular order, and somehow another person can read them years later and understand exactly what you were trying to say. It is messy and imperfect and deeply human.

Which is why I find the current obsession with AI so depressing.

Not because I think machines are secretly sentient or because I believe society is collapsing tomorrow, but because I genuinely feel like people are becoming less interested in creating things. Everywhere I look, people are generating rather than creating. Social media captions are generated. Emails are generated. Discussion posts are generated. Cover letters are generated. Entire personalities are beginning to feel generated. I cannot open LinkedIn without reading a paragraph that sounds like it was assembled in a laboratory by a committee of middle managers. Every sentence has the same rhythm. Every paragraph sounds vaguely inspirational while saying absolutely nothing. It is like the internet is slowly becoming one giant blob of beige corporate sludge.

“Delve”

“Testament”

“And honestly? That's growth”

“It’s not just —. It’s —.”

The irony is that despite avoiding AI wherever possible, I now find myself constantly worried about being mistaken for it. Every time I write an academic essay, there is a small voice in the back of my mind asking whether my work sounds too polished or too structured. Not because I think my writing is exceptional, but because AI detectors have become so commonplace that being accused of using AI no longer feels unlikely. It feels inevitable.

There are countless stories of students having legitimate work flagged by detection software, yet universities continue treating these systems as if they are reliable indicators of authorship. We are now living in a world where algorithms are being asked to determine whether another piece of writing sounds sufficiently human.

Universities constantly warn students about feeding work into AI systems. We are told to be cautious about privacy concerns, intellectual property concerns, and the possibility that our work may be stored or used in ways we do not fully understand. Yet many institutions now run student assignments through AI detection software without much discussion about what happens behind the scenes. As somebody who cares deeply about writing, I cannot help wondering where all of that work ends up. Does it get stored? Is it retained? Is it used for training purposes? Do students have any meaningful say in the process? I genuinely do not know the answers, and I suspect most students don't either.

At the same time, I understand why universities are doing it. There are absolutely students submitting AI-generated work. I have seen it myself. Group projects have become a strange exercise in trying to identify which sections were written by actual people and which ones crawled directly out of ChatGPT's asshole. You start recognising the patterns after a while. It reaches a point where you can practically hear AI speaking through the screen. "What the fucking kind of fruit is this?"

The problem is that the existence of AI-generated work does not magically make detection software accurate. If anything, the entire situation creates a bizarre environment where genuine writers are forced to defend their humanity while the people heavily relying on AI simply learn how to disguise it more effectively.

What frustrates me most, though, is not even the university side of things. It is the broader cultural shift happening around us. Every day the opportunities for writers seem to shrink a little further. Journalism, publishing, marketing, design, illustration, translation, screenwriting, and countless other creative industries are being reshaped by technology at a speed that feels impossible to keep up with. I have not even graduated yet, and already I feel like I am being pushed out of existence before I have had the opportunity to build anything.

Maybe that sounds dramatic. Maybe it is dramatic. But I think a lot of young creatives feel the same way. We spent years being told to develop our skills, find our voice, and dedicate ourselves to our craft, only to enter adulthood at the exact moment the world decided those skills were no longer worth valuing in the same way.

Sometimes I find myself fantasising about a version of life that never really existed. Sitting in a small café somewhere with a typewriter. Carrying around notebooks filled with terrible first drafts. Spending hours handwriting things simply because I enjoyed the process. It is an incredibly romanticised vision, but I think what appeals to me about it is not the nostalgia. It is the humanity. The idea that creating something is worthwhile because a human being made it, not because it was efficient or scalable or optimised.

At the end of the day, this is less a blog post about AI and more a blog post about grief. Grief for a future that feels increasingly uncertain. Most of all, it is grief for the possibility that we are slowly losing sight of why human expression mattered in the first place.

Because every time I write something, I leave a little version of myself behind on the page. A small caricature, imperfect and exaggerated, but unmistakably human. I would like to live in a world where that still means something.

Fuck.

-aleesha :(