What happens when any piece of polished writing automatically gets flagged as AI-generated?
After Buffy the Vampire Slayer actor Nicholas Brendon died on March 20 at age 54, his co-star David Boreanaz posted an Instagram tribute. Within hours, people online were convinced it was written by ChatGPT. The evidence? The writing sounded too structured. Too clean. Too much like something an AI would produce.
There is no actual evidence Boreanaz used ChatGPT. No AI detection tool flagged it. No insider confirmed it. Multiple entertainment outlets covered the tribute as a genuine personal message, quoting lines like "some moments stay small on paper - a laugh between takes, a look that says we got this."
But that didn't stop the accusation from spreading. And this is the pattern now. A well-composed email gets side-eyed. A LinkedIn post with parallel sentence structure must be AI. A celebrity tribute that doesn't contain enough typos? Obviously ChatGPT.
This is a real problem for anyone who writes professionally. AI detection tools remain unreliable - they flag human writing as AI-generated at alarming rates, and miss actual AI content just as often. The cultural reflex to assume "too polished = fake" punishes people who are simply good writers, or who took time to edit their words.
For the millions of people who use ChatGPT, Claude, and other writing tools every day, the irony is sharp: the better AI gets at mimicking human writing, the more every human's writing gets treated with suspicion.