I first encountered SentenceSmith (not its real name, but close enough that the company’s legal team would definitely still send me threatening emails) about seven months ago when my friend Tyler texted me a link with the message “dude check this out it’s wild.”
Tyler works in marketing at a mid-sized tech company and has the uncanny ability to discover every new digital tool approximately three weeks before it hits mainstream awareness. He once made me download an obscure photo-editing app that was acquired by Facebook a month later for an ungodly sum of money. I’ve learned to pay attention when Tyler sends links.
SentenceSmith promised to “revolutionize content creation through advanced AI-powered writing assistance.” Nothing new there – I’d tried plenty of AI writing tools before. Some helped with basic grammar checking, others generated usable but stiff paragraphs that required heavy editing. Most just spat out the kind of mind-numbing corporate prose that makes LinkedIn such a hellscape.
But this one was different. The demo video showed someone typing a simple prompt – “write blog post about sustainable investing trends 2025” – and the tool generated something that actually sounded… good.
Not just coherent, but engaging. It had personality. It didn’t read like it had been written by a committee of algorithms trained on business textbooks from 2010.
I signed up for the free trial immediately. My first test was simple: I asked it to write a short article about urban gardening, a topic I know reasonably well. What it produced was shockingly competent – a 700-word piece that covered space-saving techniques, companion planting, and even included a clever analogy about city apartments being like “micro-ecosystems.” It wasn’t going to win a Pulitzer, but it was absolutely on par with the mid-tier content that floods most lifestyle websites.
I tried something more technical next: an explanation of blockchain technology. Again, solid work – accurate without being overwhelmingly complex, accessible without being condescending. It even threw in a cultural reference to “digital ledgers being more reliable than your friend who still owes you money from that concert three years ago.”
I was impressed, but also confused.
I’d been following AI writing tools closely, and this seemed like a quantum leap forward. The personality, the voice, the natural flow – it didn’t make sense given what I knew about the current state of language models. So I did what any curious writer would do: I ran parts of the content through plagiarism checkers.
Nothing. I tried more sophisticated detection tools. Still clean.
I even Googled specific phrases and sentences that seemed particularly well-crafted. No matches. Intrigued, I kept experimenting.
I generated articles about remote work, cryptocurrency trends, sustainable fashion, mental health – all topics heavily covered online with thousands of existing articles. Each result was remarkably good and passed plagiarism detection with flying colors. Then I noticed something odd.
In an article about meditation techniques, the AI included a reference to “finding your breath anchor, like return to a familiar shore after swimming in the open ocean.” Something about that phrase struck me as too poetic, too specific to be algorithmically generated. I Googled it again but with quotation marks – and found nothing exact. But when I removed the word “anchor,” I found dozens of meditation articles using variations of “returning to a familiar shore after swimming in the open sea” or “like coming back to shore after swimming in the ocean.”
The phrasing was just different enough to avoid detection, but clearly derived from existing content.
I became obsessed with figuring out what was happening. I spent hours comparing SentenceSmith’s output with published articles on the same topics. What I discovered was both impressive and disturbing: SentenceSmith wasn’t creating original content so much as it was expertly remixing existing writing – changing sentence structure, swapping synonyms, reordering paragraphs, and blending elements from multiple sources into something that appeared new.
It wasn’t plagiarism in the traditional sense of copying text verbatim. It was something more sophisticated – call it “plagiarism laundering” – taking ideas, unique turns of phrase, and rhetorical structures from multiple sources and transforming them just enough to become undetectable as copies. I traced one article on productivity back to what appeared to be its source material – it had taken the structure and main points from a Harvard Business Review piece, the casual tone and transitional phrases from a popular Medium article, and quirky metaphors from a well-known self-help book.
Yet it registered as completely original to all plagiarism detection tools. I called Tyler to share my findings. “Yeah, I figured that out too,” he said, unsurprised.
“But does it matter? Nobody can tell, and it’s not technically stealing if it’s paraphrased enough, right?”
“But it is stealing,” I insisted. “It’s taking other people’s ideas and expressions and just…
laundering them.”
“Welcome to content creation in 2025,” Tyler laughed. “You think those thought leadership articles your LinkedIn connections are sharing were written from scratch? Half the internet is already remixed content.
This just automates it.”
He had a point, but it still bothered me. I decided to email SentenceSmith’s support team, framing my question carefully: “How does your AI generate content that seems so human? It’s remarkably good at creating original-sounding writing.”
Their response was a masterpiece of corporate non-disclosure: “SentenceSmith uses proprietary advanced language models trained on diverse, high-quality content sources to create unique outputs tailored to user needs.
Our technology ensures all generated content is original and free from plagiarism concerns.”
The carefully constructed vagueness told me everything I needed to know. My curiosity now verging on obsession, I decided to run a more rigorous test. I wrote a 1,000-word article about urban beekeeping myself, deliberately using unique phrasing and some personal anecdotes.
I published it on a small blog under a pseudonym. Two weeks later, I prompted SentenceSmith to write about the same topic. The result didn’t copy my article directly, but the influence was unmistakable.
It maintained its own structure but borrowed several of my distinctive phrasings (slightly reworded), followed a similar logical progression, and even included a modified version of an unusual metaphor I’d created comparing beekeeper suits to astronaut gear. That’s when I realized what made SentenceSmith different from other AI writing tools. It wasn’t just trained on published content from years ago – it was actively scraping new content across the internet, incorporating fresh material into its outputs almost in real-time.
It was like having thousands of human writers whose work you could freely mine, remix, and pass off as original. The implications were staggering. As a freelance writer who occasionally creates content for clients, I was essentially competing against a tool that could instantly access and repurpose the collective work of every writer publishing online.
Not through obvious copying that would trigger plagiarism concerns, but through sophisticated remixing that even careful readers wouldn’t detect. I canceled my free trial. A month later, I was browsing a popular business website when I came across an article about remote work trends that sounded strangely familiar.
The structure, the insights, the slightly casual but professional tone – it matched SentenceSmith’s output almost perfectly. At the bottom was a human author’s name and bio, complete with a smiling headshot. Was this person using AI to generate content under their byline, or had SentenceSmith somehow trained on this person’s writing style?
At this point, it was impossible to tell the original from the copy, the human from the machine. The real problem isn’t just that AI tools are getting better at mimicking human writing. It’s that they’re creating a closed loop where they learn from humans, generate content that humans publish, then learn from that published content to generate more.
With each cycle, the line between original human expression and AI-generated content blurs further. By the time you read this, there will be newer, even more sophisticated tools than SentenceSmith. They’ll promise even more “original” content, even more “authentic” voices.
They’ll be trained on an internet increasingly populated by the output of previous AI tools, creating a kind of second-generation remixing that’s even further removed from genuinely original human thought. We’re rapidly approaching a content landscape where everything sounds vaguely the same – professional but approachable, clever but not too clever, peppered with the same types of examples and metaphors. A homogenized writing style optimized for algorithm-based distribution rather than genuine human connection or original thinking.
Last week, I received a marketing email from SentenceSmith announcing their newest feature: custom voice matching. “Upload samples of your writing, and our AI will learn to generate content that sounds exactly like you!” The email enthused. “Maintain your unique voice across all your content without the time investment!”
The irony was too much.
A tool that excels at taking other people’s expressions and remixing them is now offering to take your expression, learn it, and eliminate the need for you to actually write anything at all. The snake eats its own tail. I showed the email to a writer friend over coffee.
She shrugged and said, “I already signed up for it. I’m ghostwriting three different executives’ blogs and this will save me hours.” She must have seen my expression because she quickly added, “Look, I know it’s weird, but this is just where things are headed. Either adapt or get left behind.”
Maybe she’s right.
Maybe resistance is futile, and we should all just surrender to a future where writing becomes less about original expression and more about prompt engineering – the art of asking AI to remix existing content in just the right way. But I can’t help feeling we’re losing something profound in the process – the genuine struggle of a human mind grappling with language to express something unique. The subtle imprint of an individual consciousness on words.
The slight variations and imperfections that make writing recognizably human. Then again, perhaps you’re not even reading words written by a human right now. Would you be able to tell the difference?
