Are we losing our relationship with language in the age of AI?

My high school diary is bursting with things that will never fall out. Newspaper clippings, chocolate wrappers, notes passed in class, everything kept at the same distance from forgetting. Somewhere in the middle, in the voluptuous self-conscious handwriting of a 14-year-old, in a sentence about love, is the word ‘surreptitiously’. It is missing an ‘r’ but absolutely certain of itself. More interesting than the spelling mistake is the fact that I remember, with complete clarity, where I first encountered the word. I collected it from Kiran Desai’s Inheritance of Loss and its meaning from my midnight blue pocket dictionary. As I flipped through some of the other diary entries, I met more of these words that I had discovered in 2004. Malady. Maudlin. Nocturne. Mildew. Petrichor. Perspicacious.

Do you remember being smitten with a new word? Not knowing how to hold it and letting it sit in your mouth like a toffee taken from a jar out of reach. Feeling it soften as you pronounce it wrong. Even today I wish list words on the back of books and in the drawers of my notes app. Foetid being the latest. But would I even be allowed to spell it wrong? How funny is it that your devices will not let you make a mistake. The red squiggly line too is now mostly a thing of the past. Now the word autocorrects itself before the hop and skip of the space bar. Are we losing something in this race for accuracy? More interestingly, if words no longer misbehave in our hands or heads, do we even know them?

This small act of getting a word wrong or letting it wobble feels almost extinct now. Forget those of us who write for a living, even outside that circle, a smog of sameness has settled in. I use smog because it is a kind of pollution and it is stifling whatever little that’s authentic in the language of these times. I understand that a mistake can be enlightening and embarrassing. It would be sentimental to pretend otherwise, but there is a difference between the embarrassment of a misspelling and the erasure of the possibility of one. And what happens when nothing we write bears the mark of having been difficult. Sure, it might save time but it is closing off the strange, slower routes of thinking. Even institutions are beginning to register it: the pope had to request the priests to not deliver Chatgpt sermons. The New York Times introduced a game of asking readers to pick the imposter between a sentence from a classic and one written by AI. I doubted my answer every step of the way. Be it the overused antithesis or the agonised em dash, the tells are everywhere and yet we can no longer read them. Nor can we see the people behind the sentences. It’s an absurd feeling, like listening to a close friend bare their soul and realising, halfway through, that you don’t recognise the voice anymore; even though they’re still saying all the right things. Even though the words are perfect, or maybe especially because the words are perfect.

Thinking and writing have always lived on either sides of a tumultuous river; a bustling street if you prefer your metaphors urban. Something must be lost and remade in the crossing between them. And that crossing is where your voice lives. Invite a machine to do this work and the question is no longer about spelling or style, it is about whether language, without a body, can mean anything at all. The first instinct is always to blame the machines, but the interesting question is the one nobody is asking: why is everyone so desperate to be heard right now. And all the time. Hot takes, long winding captions and Substack essays. Is it about sounding smart or do they finally have help to put down what’s always been on their mind. Nonetheless, I think the language of today needs reminders that mistakes are beautiful things, really.

And sometimes they have a mind of their own. Writer Sofia Samatar, in a lecture she delivered online during Covid, spoke about a Mennonite Bishop in Virginia who kept a meticulous weather diary for every day of his adulthood. In the early entries he wrote ‘sings of rain’. Later he corrected himself, signs, obviously, signs of rain. This mistake knew more than the man making it. It arrived from somewhere beneath language, or beyond it, and left a mark the right spelling could not touch.

Now that everyone has found their voice and it is sounding a lot like one another, maybe let’s wonder why we gravitate towards one that’s polished and too perfect? If we could go back to before AI entered the scene, we had already been training ourselves into a particular kind of linguistic obedience. Anyone who has spent time with The Elements of Style knows the quiet tyranny of a well-turned sentence. Kill your darlings is the phrase we hear the most in our writing careers. Yet, for anyone who loves language, it’s an absolute fatigue, like how minimalism taught us to look away from the chaos of colour on a gopuram, all those gods, demons and peacocks dreaming in stone, and call it clutter.

None of this would be half as troubling if we weren’t also losing the pen. While it is exciting to see election campaigns include promises for fully digital classrooms, I worry that the future will take the pen away and with it the little caret ^ that gives a roof to forgotten letters, and there’s something to say for the crossed-out word that meant something before it meant something better.

Just to also be a harbinger of solace, there is now the return to analogue; flip phones, mp3 players, and camcorders. Of all the things worth retrieving, the pen feels most pressing, I think, as I run my finger along the faint purple ink of a Reynolds ball point they don’t manufacture anymore, back in the pages of the diary. I was quick to notice an ick in my own plump cursive. u instead of you. Whole sentences reduced to skin and bones. I had almost forgotten how we squeezed everything into shorthand because it cost money to type more, and of course, because your thumb hurt. And that slipped into your diary entries, the love letters, even our answer papers, where teachers circled them in red with multiple exclamation marks of disbelief. But eventually, the full words returned. You found its missing letters. Words stopped jostling and could stretch and yawn again. Which makes me think maybe this too will pass. Maybe one day we’ll look at the polished, too perfect writing of 2020s and feel the same collective embarrassment, we would if we could once again watch ourselves type “u thr? nvm. ttyl”.

Lead image: Tanya Chaturvedi

This article originally appeared in Harper's Bazaar India's April-May 2026 print issue.

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