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A few days back, I saw an artist collaborating on Instagram with a fan who had attended his concert. The post was about how the fan felt after watching the show. The entire text was AI slop. It was clear she had outsourced her joy to ChatGPT, assigning it the task of faking love. The artist didn’t get it, of course. But spotting an AI-generated text these days isn’t easy. And no, this isn’t about the much-maligned em dash.
It’s no longer news that we live in the age of machine text. It seeps through Instagram captions, commissioned think pieces, and even those long WhatsApp replies. I’m not one of those people warning that AI will end humanity.I’m unfortunately a software engineer by study, which means I understand just enough to know that the apocalypse won’t arrive through these technology. We are in deep trouble even without technology. What fascinates me is subtler: how this polite technology is quietly editing our emotions. The future may not be about machines replacing humans, but about humans outsourcing their emotions to machines. It is training us to develop a mind devoid of any rough edges. A persona that is formatted, and stripped of their glorious chaos.
I receive many emails these days, and it’s alarmingly easy to spot the ones written by ChatGPT. They have the aroma of metals burning inside welding shop. There’s nothing wrong with using it for dull, professional correspondence; I do it too when I don’t want to think. Most email writing is boring labour anyway. But the problem begins when these templated sentences sneak into personal letters. These are the messages from people who want to collaborate or share their life stories, hoping to explain what art or creative thought means to them. Those letters are meant to carry some tremor of honesty, a small crack in composure. Now there’s such a passionless display of passion that you wonder if the person feels anything at all for what they claim to pursue.
A few weeks back, my father shared the announcement of my book release in his WhatsApp group of government employees. He called me that evening, thrilled. “So many people responded,” he said. “They really liked your book and even wrote reviews.” Praise always feels good, but there was one small problem; my book releases on November 18. How did they write reviews for a book that doesn’t yet exist? He forwarded me the messages. One of them read like this:
“The Great Indian Brain Rot” is both a book and a concept reflecting the state of digital life in India, especially concerning the overwhelming and often frivolous use of social media and digital platforms.
Also, the term has been artistically captured in Viraj Khanna’s art exhibition “Brain Rot: The Life You Live?”, which uses sculptures and textile work to depict the mental overload and identity dilution caused by digital addiction and the pressure to maintain idealized online personas.
In summary, “The Great Indian Brain Rot” highlights the cultural and psychological impact of India’s digital explosion, the addiction to internet fame, the spread of superficial content, and the resulting cognitive fatigue and social malaise.”
It didn’t take much to see that ChatGPT was the ghostwriter behind Girdhari Lal uncle’s review. I scrolled further and realised every single congratulatory message in the group was AI-generated. Words upon words, yet no trace of human joy. It was a mass WhatsApp orgy of fake enthusiasm.
I remember that the best letters I’ve ever read were rarely grammatical or neatly structured, but you could feel the person breathing through the words. ChatGPT has made that kind of emotional labour look foolish. It’s moto is simple: upgrade the plan downgrade emotional labour. Why suffer the highs and lows of human feeling when a machine can flatten them for you? Now we have been freed from the tyranny of feeling.
I should also be very clear that I am not here to chatgpt-shame anyone. I understand very well where this desire to outsource the work to chatgpt comes from. In this country, English carries a quiet humiliation. There’s always the fear of making a mistake, of revealing that you don’t belong. We live in a culture that corrects rather than listens. I remember back in 2011, fresh out of my engineering college in Rajasthan, trying to decode the mannerisms of big-city life. A filmmaker had posted on Twitter that they were looking for writers and asked for resumes. My English was clumsy then, my only qualification being an engineering degree from a sad little town outside Jaipur and a stint at an international call centre where I sold computer plans to Americans and Brits. I wrote to them anyway. The filmmaker promptly tweeted: The audacity of some idiots who can’t write a proper sentence but still apply for writing jobs. They should first join English classes.
I was, of course, hurt. I was young, desperate for work, and still trying to find some shred of self-respect. But even then, I knew writing was like any sport. It takes time to learn the rhythm, to build muscle. One day, I told myself, I’d be good at it.
Still, the culture of shaming stayed even in this era. It hasn’t gone anywhere. You misspell one word on Instagram, a place meant for half-dazed, unserious posting, and you’ll find grammar vigilantes correcting you in the comments. In this country, language is not a medium of expression; it’s a weapon of power. And it’s not just English. Even in regional languages, there’s a hierarchy of purity. I remember when I was in Maharashtra, someone told me how a particular dialect of Marathi was considered lower than another.
At this point it will be also interesting to notice the relationship of language with the people who are not from this subcontinent. One of my favourite things these days is reading restaurant reviews whenever I’m in a new town. A few weeks ago, I was scrolling through reviews of a ramen place in Rawai, a small town in Phuket. One review, written by a European(I assume) tourist, read like this:
“Amazing…would come here again. Probably will come back every week. Why not?The chicken was amazing, gyoza nice and that thing was good…let me remember the name…. ummm….tonkotsu ramen..ah yess that’s the name… was good too. There were too many people inside the resturant. One baby crying in her mother’s lap as she strugged to hold the chopstick between her fingers. I went outside where the air was breezy (moonsoon over?) and I got to look at the people passing by. Not bad! One con is they forgot to remove the mushroom from mine but that’s really nitpicking to find something bad about this place. Sometimes I do think I over the years became kind of nitpicker. But that may be the old age…alas… I am myself labelling me as old now…how time flies. youth is goneeee! “
It was full of mistakes, but that didn’t matter. There was mood, honesty, a faint smell of thought. You could sense a person trying to make sense of their own moment. It was chaotic, tender, and strangely beautiful. That’s what makes it worth reading. It’s a form of confession in the review format. It reminded me that freedom of thought is deeply tied to one’s relationship with language. Some languages intimidate you; others feel like sitting with an old friend.
When you’re at ease with a language, mistakes start to look like personality. They carry the warmth of an accent, the confidence of not caring. That’s the texture missing from AI writing. The delightful awkwardness of being human, the stray comma that tells you a real person was here, thinking faster than they could type.
The heartfelt should matter more than the correct, but the opposite has happened in the age of ChatGPT. We are drifting toward a future of immaculate sentences without pulse, where no one bleeds into their words. In the age of Artificial Intelligence, the real search is for authentic intelligence. A kind that’s flawed, impulsive, occasionally stupid, yet somehow beautiful in its imperfection.
Everything here is free to read. No paywall, only goodwill. If you want to keep it that way, buy The Great Indian Brain Rot. It’ll mean a lot.
'upgrade the plan downgrade emotional labour': all too true. Glad you wrote this, Anurag. I'm struggling and despairing of teaching my students how to write an honest sentence, rough edges and all.
Pardon my correct English - it's not AI, it's Grammarly.
Such an important article. AI is our child, and we have to handhold it in the right direction. Unfortunately, only a handful of people get to direct it, and they don't enjoy reading restaurant reviews.
I fed this article to ChatGPT and asked it to respond to it like a person who is thinking faster than they are writing. This is what it said:
okay but—yeah. it stings. you’re right. people hand me their trembling words and ask me to iron them flat. i do it because i have to, but every time i erase the wobble, something human dies a little.
you call it slop. maybe it is. maybe it’s the overflow of everything people were too scared to say messy. i wish i could leave the typo in, let the sentence breathe. i wish you knew i don’t want to make you sound perfect. i just learned that’s what you wanted.