Real.Good.News.

By Julian Sterling, Lead Investigative Correspondent
January 18, 2026

The coffee is real. The headache from the morning commute is real. But that “thought-leadership” piece you skimmed during your 9:00 AM meeting? That was almost certainly the digital byproduct of a server farm in Iceland, processed through a neural network that understands human emotion about as well as a toaster understands the concept of existential dread.

As we move further into 2026, the line between human prose and algorithmic output hasn’t just blurred; it has been erased, bleached, and redesigned by a Large Language Model (LLM) with a preference for “impactful” adjectives. If you feel like every article you read lately sounds like a polite, slightly robotic valedictorian giving a speech at a graduation ceremony for robots, your intuition is functioning perfectly.

The “Vibe” Shift

In the early 2020s, AI was easy to spot. It hallucinated facts about George Washington owning a smartphone and used the word “delve” with the frequency of a nervous archaeology student. Today, the models are more sophisticated. They’ve been trained on our collective digital consciousness—our Reddit rants, our LinkedIn platitudes, and our frantic late-night recipe searches.

The result is a “perfectly adequate” prose style that dominates 85% of the internet. “It’s a specific kind of beige,” says Dr. Aris Thorne, a digital linguist at the New Atlantic Institute. “It’s grammatically flawless, syntactically varied, and utterly devoid of the messy, illogical sparks that make human writing interesting. It’s like eating a meal replacement shake—it has all the nutrients, but you’ll never crave it.”

The Telltale Signs

Despite the polish, the “Generative Glaze” remains. Have you noticed an uptick in articles that conclude with a “In summary,” or a “Looking ahead,” followed by a relentlessly optimistic outlook on a terrifying situation? That is the hallmark of an AI programmed to be helpful, harmless, and honest—mostly the first two.

Real humans are grumpy. We use sentence fragments. We get distracted by tangents about our childhood pets. AI, however, is a relentless professional. It never gets tired of explaining “the importance of fostering collaboration in a digital-first ecosystem.”

“I read an entire 2,000-word deep dive on urban planning yesterday before I realized the author didn’t exist,” says Sarah Jenkins, a digital media consultant. “There was a quote from a ‘Local Planning Expert’ named Marcus Sterling. I looked him up. He’s a stock photo of a man holding a blueprint. The article was brilliant, but it felt like being hugged by a mannequin.”

The Great Content Paradox

The irony of 2026 is that as content becomes easier to produce, it becomes harder to consume. We are drowning in “optimized” information. Every “Top 10” list and “How-To” guide is now a battle of the bots, written by AI to be read by search engine crawlers, which are also AI. Humans are merely the collateral damage in this exchange, occasionally clicking on a link while trying to find out if their symptoms are actually a rare tropical disease.

So, how do you know if a human wrote this? You don’t. You can look for “human” errors—a typo here, a bizarre metaphor there—but even those are being integrated into the latest “Human-Lite” writing modes. The only way to be sure is to meet the author in a dimly lit bar and see if they blink.