This column must've used AI (it didn't)

Once upon a time, there was the worry that when you handed in your school essay, it would be so decent that your teacher would return it a few days later, accusing you of getting your mother to have written it. Now that you're a big boy/girl/birl, your concern is that everyone will think you've used an AI chatbot. 'Bet DeepSeek or Copilot wrote that,' is a tough accusation to shake off-especially if your natural writing style has a knack for being a tad purple, and your fondness for words like 'symphony' and adjectives like 'delightful' and 'mesmerising' can't be curbed.

People who love the style in which AI writes-still overwhelmingly in English, since Hindi, Marathi, Bengali...walas are busy gawking at the tech-are usually unaware of the concept of 'style'. You write (in AI-speak 'you pen') a scathing, bullet-pointed, too-many-adjectived wooden op-ed, and even with the help of only cutting-edge Spellcheck Holmes and no ChatGPT, others will hiss, 'Oh my, it smells like AI.' At this rate, even writing 'Happy Birthday!' with proper punctuation is grounds for running a Turing Test. So, beware. If you show signs of intelligence-especially one that's suspiciously artificial-stop writing. The other option is that you get a smart person to ghostwrite for you. Because writing yourself without using a chatbot might expose your incompetence further.