26 April,2026 08:45 AM IST | Mumbai | Nishant Sahdev
Pics/iStock
Tuesday morning. You open your phone, and there it is: the perfect message.
Maybe it's a vendor apologising for a delayed invoice. Maybe an acquaintance bailing on a dinner party. It's smooth. Way too smooth. It hits the exact right emotional notes, offers precisely the right amount of contrition, and signs off perfectly. Not a single typo in sight -- same words, same tone again and again, because you know, that a human didn't write it. You're talking to a server farm roleplaying as an empathetic manager.
We are drowning in cheap competence. The tech industry finally did it: they made polish completely worthless. Need an apology to your spouse? A cover letter? A stock photo of a crowded street? It doesn't take time, talent, or sweat anymore. You just type a prompt, wait three seconds, and take what the machine spits out.
But when everything gets this frictionless, our brains rebel.
Evolutionary biologists have this concept called Costly Signalling Theory. It basically says that for a signal to be believable, it has to actually cost the sender something. A peacock's massive, heavy tail is a costly signal - it proves to a mate that the bird is strong enough to survive despite carrying around a giant, neon target.
For the last hundred years of human communication, perfection was our costly signal. A beautifully handwritten letter or a crafted, error-free memo took immense labour. The lack of mistakes was the proof of devotion. It signalled: I care about this enough to spend my limited time getting it right.
AI completely inverted that economy. When perfection became instantaneous and free, it ripped the soul right out of it. Today, sending a flawless, three-paragraph apology doesn't mean you care. It just means you couldn't be bothered to type out your actual, messy feelings. You outsourced your empathy to a microprocessor.
We sense this change. A colleague recently noted how sterile digital interactions affect us: without human error, we feel unsafe. Our brains, wired for reality's friction, experience low-grade anxiety when faced with excessive polish. Overly polite emails trigger the uncanny valley; we don't feel heard, we feel managed.
It feeds right into the "Dead Internet Theory" - that creeping, paranoid sensation that you are the only actual human left in the room, surrounded by bots talking to other bots. So, what happens when the world gets too smooth? We start looking for the cracks.
Look at the cultural data. It's not just happening in text; it's everywhere. Look at how Gen Z uses social media. The heavily filtered, hyper-curated Instagram aesthetic of 2016 is dead. What's the status symbol now? The "photo dump". Blurry pictures, bad lighting, terrible angles. Apps like BeReal exploded because they explicitly forbade you from editing or preparing. The youth culture intuitively figured out before the rest of us that polish is a commodity, but reality is scarce.
If you look at the weird corners of the internet right now, digital creators are actively tossing out the sharpest new tools. They're digging through digital trash for clunky software from two years ago. They don't want perfect, high-def renders that look like luxury watch ads. They want the glitch. They want fragmented, bizarre sentences. They want the eerie pictures with seven melting fingers.
Remember 2022? When AI first hit the mainstream, it was like a brilliant, drunk oracle. Ask for a bike, get a cheese wheel. Ask for a poem, get an existential crisis. It was raw and unpredictable. Now, big tech has scrubbed it clean. The machines don't hallucinate. They speak with the flat, terrified voice of a corporate lawyer. The weirdness is gone, replaced by a brightly lit parking lot of unyielding competence.
And we hate it.
It's the exact same impulse that drove us back to vinyl records and heavy film cameras in the age of Spotify and iPhones. The hiss and grain aren't bugs; they're features. They're the sound of a needle fighting dust and gravity. We crave that texture because it's proof that something physical is happening in the room.
The digital glitch is the new vinyl crackle. Because AI can fake being professional, humans are going to have to start faking being messy just to prove they're real.
We are entering the era of the bespoke typo.
The ultimate status symbol will soon be an all-lowercase email with a blatant typo sent from a phone. This "bespoke typo" is a flex that screams: I am human, my time is valuable, and I typed this myself. We used to prove we were human by solving CAPTCHAs - identifying traffic lights or doing basic math. Soon, we'll prove we're human by our inability to spell "definitely" correctly on the first try.
We'll see creative agencies start deliberately using glitchy software for billboard campaigns, leaning into a jagged, messy aesthetic because it carries a rugged energy that a polished render can't touch. We're going to intentionally sabotage our own digital footprints. We will manufacture flaws just to prove we're still breathing.
Of course, corporations will eventually try to weaponise this. We'll see customer service bots programmed to use slang, hesitate, or insert typos to mimic humanity. And we will hate that even more, because manufactured authenticity is the most dystopian fake of all.
The great irony of the artificial intelligence race is that the engineers built exactly what they set out to build: an invisible, optimizing servant that never gets tired and never messes up. They just forgot who they were building it for.
We're a spectacularly messy species. We are defined entirely by our contradictions, our neuroses, and our glorious, unpredictable mistakes. We don't actually want a perfect digital god smoothing out the edges of our lives. We want a mirror.
And sometimes, just to know we're still alive in a flat, sterile world, we need that reflection to be a little bit broken.
Nishant Sahdev is a theoretical physicist at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of the forthcoming The Last Equation Before Silence.
