Only human

So I asked ChatGPT to write a blog post on why AI bots should never be allowed to write a blog post, and to do it in the style of Garth Turner.

Here are some highlights:

Title: Why Blog Posts Should Never Be Written by AI
By Garth Turner (or someone who at least still remembers what that means)

Let’s get something straight: words matter. Real ones. The kind that come from brains wired by experience, scarred by history, and caffeinated enough to care. Which is why no blog worth reading should ever be written by artificial intelligence.

Oh sure, the bots can string sentences together. They’re charmingly competent little parrots—trained on oceans of text written by actual humans who’ve lived, loved, lost, and paid their mortgage. But the whole point of a blog isn’t syntax. It’s soul.

1. AI can’t have a bad day—and that’s the problem.
A good blog post breathes. It smells faintly of your mood and circumstance. Maybe you’re mad at the market, elated about a good trade, or simply fed up with the way everyone’s pretending things are fine. That’s the secret sauce: emotion, reaction, impulse. AI doesn’t have bad days. It has data.

2. Nuance lives in the lived-in.
When I write, it’s because I’ve seen the cycle. Markets boom. Markets bust. Politicians preen and pension plans crumble. You can smell what’s coming if you’ve stood near enough to the wreckage before.

AI doesn’t smell anything. It pattern-matches. It samples headlines and predicts tone. But that isn’t insight; it’s mimicry. The best writing comes from understanding &emdash; not from aggregation. Humans know what it felt like in 2008, in 2020, and maybe again in 2025.

3. Authenticity isn’t optional.
Readers don’t visit blogs for perfect prose. They come for someone they can nod (or snarl) along with. They come to argue, agree, scoff, or stew. They come for the unmistakable voice—a voice you trust enough to tell you when the housing market’s too hot, or the politicians are selling you snake oil.

An AI doesn’t have a mortgage, a tax bill, or a beating heart. It can’t rant credibly about the condo bubble or the insanity of government spending. It can only pretend to rant, and pretense is death to authenticity.

4. Truth needs fingerprints.
When you read something worth reading, you can feel the fingerprints &emdash; tiny imperfections that make it real. A misplaced comma. A weird metaphor. A sigh between paragraphs.

AI scrubs all that out. It sanitizes. Optimizes. Predicts the next best word with chilling precision. But “the next best word” is almost never the right one.

5. The danger isn’t bad writing—it’s passable writing.
If AI wrote like AI, fine. We’d know to ignore it. But that’s not what’s happening. The real trouble is when AI starts producing prose so smooth, so statistically perfect, that you stop noticing it’s hollow.

It’s like eating a beautifully plated dinner that turns out to be made of Styrofoam. Looks great. Fills nothing.

The takeaway
AI will take your emails, your reports, your corporate sludge &emdash; and fine, it should. But blog posts? Real ones? The kind that tick people off, make them think, make them write you back in outrage or gratitude? Those still belong to the human animal.

Because at the end of the day, a blog without a pulse isn’t a blog. It’s just a filing cabinet with delusions of relevance.

Would you like me to polish this further to sound even closer to Garth Turner’s cadence and phrasing (shorter, punchier, almost journalistic style)?

_______________________________

Hmmm. That took two seconds. Of course I’m devastated the bot left out any reference to my abs. Or the dog fetish. But you can see the danger. Humans are now optional. I’m optional. Greater Fool could bot along on its own for the next 17 years, with readers sopping it up. Most blissfully unaware I was on the Harley. Or deceased.

The line between fake and authentic is blurring by the hour. Does anyone care that a well-known romance novel writer has embraced AI, and boosted her output from ten books a year to 200? Nah, apparently not. Just keep the sex scenes rolling.

We all know this wave’s just started to wash over us. Text, video, photos, research papers, spreadsheets, books, graphics, fine art, legislation, legal briefs, real estate listings, porn – there’s usually no assurance any of it came by a human hand, guided by a sentient mind.

But there is here.

The bot above did a fine job aping me and telling you why bots suck. But it forgot honesty.

Today this blog professes its humanity. Everything, regardless of how demented, ageist, insulting, myopic, wrong or prescient it may be, is 100% certified, authentic human content. That will never change. Never vary. Never fail. In other words, when I’m dead you’ll know it.

About the picture: It’s AI, of course. This was the prompt into Grok: “Square format photo of a mutt dog, a mongrel, snarling and angry at the camera, in a forest.”

To be in touch or send a picture of your actual, real beast, email to ‘garth@garth.ca’.

Source: https://www.greaterfool.ca/2026/02/13/only-human-3/