Reading for the Seams

It's a strange thing, reading. You encounter a mind that isn't in the room. Or at least that's what it used to be. A particular person thinking in a particular way. Somewhere else. Most of the time you never notice the reaching as it happens. You just read. But the contact is underneath the activity, the reason a sentence feels like more than information, the reason you can finish something and feel you've met whoever wrote it.

That contact used to have an unwritten assumption: the words came from a mind. That assumption held for so long it stopped looking like an assumption, more like the ground we stand on, like air or water. It was just what reading was. And it's the part that has quietly come loose.

A polished document used to mean someone capable struggled with their work. They shaped the structure, and the structure worked hard enough that it couldn't really be faked. You couldn't produce the thing without thinking. You had to do the work. Writing carried a watermark, or a signature, marks of the person who put in the effort. Ultimately that residue was a side effect of the work being hard to get right.^[1] I instantly know a Zadie Smith piece, the second I start reading. She is there on the page.

None of that feels true anymore. "Slop" is everywhere. Documents, presentations, emails, etc., still arrive, and in so many ways they arrive faster and cleaner than before. What's gone completely unreliable is our ability to guess at the mind from the thing we've been handed. The final shape of what's produced and the existence of the thinking behind it have been decoupled. The speed at which this happened is still surprising to me.

Someone congratulated a teammate of mine recently on what they called Claude's work. The compliment was meant warmly, in the way people sometimes acknowledge a job well done by acknowledging the tool. I knew what the actual work had taken. I also knew my teammate had ground through all the legwork the long way, and the domain was one in which the models of the day are usually more unhelpful than helpful. The compliment landed somewhere between a misread and some small theft. The person on the receiving end took it well, the way you have to take these things now. And probably no one else noticed the moment pass. I watched a real piece of work get attributed to a machine because the work looked like the kind of thing a machine does well now, to someone peering in from outside.

Now, when I know the details of how something works, I read with one kind of suspicion: was the clarity of thought earned, or did a system produce something that looks right? When I don't know the domain, the suspicion changes. Sometimes I'm wondering whether a human was involved at all. Same document, two readings, neither generous in the way reading used to be.^[2] And people lose credit in both directions. Work gets attributed to the machine because it looks polished enough to have come from one, including, perversely, work the machine couldn't have done.

The closest thing in nature is the orchid mantis. I watch a lot of National Geographic. A lot. Usually if I wake up early, or can't sleep. I'll decide to learn about bees or hyenas or orcas. But my true favorites are the mimics. The octopus who is now a rock, now sand. Or the mantis that's a better flower. The orchid mantis doesn't so much hide as a flower; it lures. It's brighter and more symmetrical and more present than the real flowers nearby. It lures more pollinators than the flowers around it. Insects come to it because it has out-bloomed the blooms.

With the mantis in the field, the flower category itself is unstable; the insects can no longer trust what they used to navigate by. Flowers whose signal hasn't been captured yet become more popular, and the insects that find them are the ones whose senses have shifted to look for the flower that doesn't eat them.

In my National Geographic-addled brain, this is roughly what has happened to reading. The mantises are in the field. The flowers are still there, but harder to find on first read, because so many mantises occupy the same visual slot. And the production of mantises has been industrialized in a way no prior counterfeiting was. None of the prior shifts in how thinking traveled (printing press, photography, internet) quite did this. So now I search for rough edges, signals that the mimic doesn't produce by default: friction, a sentence that takes a strange turn, a joke that survives because the writer clearly couldn't resist it. Unflattering specificity. None of these are proof of humanity, but they're enough. For now. Humanity is relocating to places harder to reach without actually being a person.^[3]

I recently picked up an essay collection by Gore Vidal, someone who actually lived in their sentences. He was prickly, angry, funny, wandering around topics I'd never given much thought to. Performative sometimes. Actually: often. Reading went back to how it used to feel. Vidal chose his commitments there on the page: insults that tried too hard, rhythms that wandered because he got interested somewhere in the sentence and forgot to optimize it, oddly specific phrases. I could sense a person on the other side of the page because he couldn't help being there.

Today's mimics can produce something that occupies the same slot in the inbox. But when you find writing that's still inhabited, you know it before you can say why. A readerly feeling arrives first, then some kind of recognition behind it. Someone was here.

It's even weirder at work, where we are now besieged by the mantis, the octopus, the snapping turtle. Most work writing is operational, and most of it is happily served by clean polish lacking much original thought. Status updates, calendar replies, the meeting recap. Nobody wants a person's full presence inside a meeting recap, and most models produce excellent meeting recaps.^[4] The zone where personal touch mattered was always smaller: emails that do real explanatory work, strategy documents where someone is visibly thinking through a problem, the write up from a peer about a process you thought you understood, in a voice so unmistakably theirs that you knew who had sent it before you scrolled to the signature. This kind of writing was already rare pre-LLM. Years ago, when I worked at Google, one specific PM was so famous for his out-of-office message that you hoped he might be on vacation when you hit send.

It's just tough to find that stuff now. The real gems sit indistinguishable, flowers surrounded by many more mantises.

It's strange how quietly the whole condition is being absorbed. Everyone reading documents now carries suspicion by default, and everyone writing them knows they will be read with that suspicion. I've seen presentations where the logo is barely but noticeably off and the boxes are perfectly aligned. Nobody says anything more than a laugh. The same documents go around the same meetings, compliments get exchanged, and the whole apparatus continues running on signals that everyone collectively knows aren't as reliable as they used to be. Because there's no good register in which to talk about it, nobody talks about it. To name your suspicion sounds paranoid, and to act on it sounds petty. But to ignore it risks being misled. So we sit halfway between trusting and refusing, and read much more carefully now when reading used to just flow. It's exhausting.

As someone who has spent years writing thoughts as carefully and precisely as I can, I'm in a strange spot. That care is still useful, just not as distinguishable as it used to be, because the new readers can't always tell whether the care was mine or some tool's. Every day, the new tools can produce something that looks even more careful, meticulous even. I write documents too. I use the models to test thinking, and more than I would have guessed even a year ago.^[5] Some of what I write now would read differently to me if a colleague had sent it. The reading habits I've described don't switch off when I'm the one producing.

It's everyone's problem now. The expert reading skeptically becomes the outsider being read skeptically two meetings later. The person peering in from outside a domain is, in their own domain, the one whose work is getting constantly re-attributed to a machine. Everyone is stuck in both roles. We accumulate both kinds of fatigue, and the tools that produced the condition keep getting more capable. Nothing about this will stabilize, I suspect. And yet we go on anyway.

Or maybe it's not a problem at all, but the same dynamic playing out in flower fields in Malaysia. Selection pressure. An evolutionary arms race. We'll be the insects, looking for the less good flowers with the weaker blooms. Or different flowers altogether. Writing convinces less on its own now and more by whether it sounds truly like the person who sent it, whether it fits what you've seen them think before, whether the thinking survives contact with conversation. I notice this already happening in small ways: people defaulting to voice notes for things that used to be emails (voice seems harder to fake but how long will that last?), or stylistic moves becoming tells, where overly clean transitions read as mimic and weird tangents read as human. Captured signals don't usually come back. The reef is just dangerous now, every rock potentially hiding something.

Recognition used to come naturally. You read someone's email and you knew them a little better. Someone's doc exposed their thinking, and you trusted them a little more.^[6] That recognition still lands, but only sometimes.

The minds are still there. Long emails are still being written by the same people who used to write them. What's changing is where I find the people, and what I'm reading for when I do: the seams.