Uncanny Valley Prose: Why Everything You Read Now Sounds Slightly Dead

Yesterday, I asked my students how AI is shaping their lives. The answer? They’re not just using it—they’re mainlining it. One student, a full-time accountant, told me she relies on ChatGPT Plus not only to crank out vendor emails and fine-tune her accounting homework but also to soothe her existential dread. She even introduced me to her AI therapist, a calm, reassuring voice named Charles. Right there in class, she pulled out her phone and said, “Charles, I’m nervous about McMahon’s writing class. What do I do?” Charles—an oracle in a smartphone—whispered affirmations back at her like a velvet-voiced life coach. She smiled. I shuddered. The age of emotional outsourcing is here, and Charles is just the beginning.

Victoria Turk’s “The Great Language Flattening” captures this moment with unnerving clarity: AI has seized the global keyboard. It’s not just drafting high school essays or greasing the wheels of college plagiarism—it’s composing résumés, memos, love letters, apology emails, vision statements, divorce petitions, and maybe the occasional haiku. Thanks to AI’s knack for generating prose in bulk, the world is now awash in what I call The Bloated Effect: overcooked, overwritten, and dripping with unnecessary flair. If verbosity were currency, we’d all be trillionaires of fluff.

But bloat is just the appetizer. The main course is The Homogenization Effect—our collective descent into stylistic conformity. AI-generated writing has a tone, and it’s everywhere: politely upbeat, noncommittally wise, and as flavorful as a rice cake dipped in lukewarm chamomile. Linguist Philip Seargeant calls it the Uncanny Valley of Prose—writing that looks human until you actually read it. It’s not offensive, it’s just eerily bloodless. You can feel the algorithm trying to sound like someone who’s read too many airport self-help books and never had a real conversation.

Naturally, there will be a backlash. A rebellion of ink-stained fingers and dog-eared yellow legal pads. Safety away from computers, we’ll smuggle our prose past the algorithmic overlords, draft manifestos in cafés, and post screenshots of AI-free writing like badges of authenticity. Maybe we’ll become cult heroes for writing with our own brains. I admit, I fantasize about this. Because when I think of the flattening of language, I think of “Joan Is Awful”—that Black Mirror gem where Salma Hayek licenses her face to a streaming platform that deepfakes her into oblivion. If everyone looks like Salma, then no one is beautiful. AI is the Salma Clone Generator of language: it replicates what once had soul, until all that’s left is polished sameness. Welcome to the hellscape of Uncanny Valley—brought to you by WordCount™, optimized for mass consumption.