He meant he went upstairs. AI just brought it back.

English class, ninth grade ... verbatim

Teacher

"Akshay, read the last line of what you have written in answer one."

Akshay

"I... locomoted upwards."

Teacher

"What does that mean?"

Akshay

"Ma'am... he went upstairs."

There was about half a second of silence. Then the whole class laughed, including the teacher, and eventually, including Akshay. He had opened a thesaurus, found a fancy-sounding word for "went", replaced it, and then found a fancy-sounding word for "up", and replaced that too. He was being thorough. He was being, in his own way, aspirational. And the result was a sentence that communicated nothing to anyone, including himself.

I grew up hearing from one of my uncles that I should read the editorial pages of The Hindu if I ever wanted to improve my English. He said this quite casually, the way uncles say things, as if the advice required no further elaboration and the method was obviously self-evident. I tried. I genuinely tried. But the editorial pages of The Hindu did not feel like English to me. They felt like someone had taken English and inflated it... pumped it full of words until all the air inside was replaced by confusion. I would get to the end of a sentence and realise I had no idea what I had just read.

I eventually landed on a conclusion that I have not moved from since: a language is a tool for communication. The moment the words you choose make the communication harder than the message itself, you have failed at the primary job. Not failed at English. Failed at the point of English.

The goal was never to impress. The goal was to be understood. Akshay had both of those mixed up. So do a lot of people now. The vocabulary is different. The mistake is the same.

Then came AI and man things have changed.

Actually, I want to stop there for a moment and be more specific. Because I keep saying this to people and I realise I am not always saying it precisely enough. The problem is not AI. The problem is a particular thing that some people are doing with AI... a specific reflex I have watched happen dozens of times now. They write something. It is simple, clear, direct. It says what they mean. And then they paste it into an AI tool and ask it to "make it more professional." And the AI does exactly what it is asked. It makes it more professional. It makes it longer, smoother, more formal... and somewhere in that process, the person who wrote the original sentence disappears entirely from the text.

I receive emails now from people I have known for years, and I sometimes cannot tell that it is them. The rhythm is gone. The particular way they would phrase a question, or circle back to something, or end an email with a half-joke; none of that survives the AI pass. What I get instead is a well-structured message with a subject line that reads "Pursuant to our earlier discussion" and a closing that says "Please do not hesitate to reach out should you require any further clarification."

A young chap I have been working with for two years sent me an email recently with the phrase "as per the extant guidelines" in what was, essentially, a message asking whether a meeting was still happening. I thought I shall ask him directly whether he had run it through ChatGPT. I did not. I was not sure I wanted to know.

The thing that prompted me to actually write this was a screenshot someone sent me from a movie review. A Hindi film, reviewed for an audience whose mother tongue is, by definition, Hindi. One line reads: "The nurse is wracked by doubt." Another says this dilemma is "by no means the film's principal conflict." I may be misremembering the surrounding sentences, but those two phrases are accurate; I can see them. I am not sure what percentage of the audience for a Hindi film on a Friday evening would reach for "wracked by doubt" as their natural phrasing. I suspect the reviewer did not either, before the AI pass.

A friend who runs a small content agency in Bangalore told me something that stuck. He said he had lost a client in Hyderabad last quarter; Rs 3.5 lakh project, four months of work, because the client said all the content felt like it came from the same place. "My writers had all started polishing their drafts with AI," he told me. "And somewhere in the polishing, they all started sounding like each other. Like the same slightly formal, slightly cautious, slightly impressive person who does not quite exist." He paused. "My client could feel that the person was not there."

This is the thing Akshay got wrong in ninth grade. Not the words. The absence of a person behind the words. He had replaced himself with a thesaurus and the result was a sentence that technically existed and communicated nothing.

I am not saying do not use AI. Please use it. Use it to catch the spellings, the grammatical slips, the places where your sentence lost its own thread. That is a genuinely remarkable thing to have available and I use it that way myself, quite regularly. What I am saying is: use it as a spell-checker, not as a ghostwriter. Use it to fix the sentence, not to replace the person who wrote it.

Because the sentence you wrote, clumsy and honest and occasionally slightly wrong, is the only evidence that you were there. That you thought about this. That the words came from someone.

The moment you hand that to something that makes it cleaner and more formal and indistinguishable from every other clean, formal piece of text on the internet... you have locomoted upwards. You have gone somewhere, technically. But nobody knows it was you.

I have re-read this piece four times and changed a different word each time. I stopped at four. I am not sure that was the right number. :)