I have no insight into whether this is AI-generated or not, but reading it did make me think about a piece of advice that I would give to writers who are just starting out: you have to understand the meta.

In an online game like Hearthstone, which relies on different character “types” playing cards against each others, players are really alert to what they call the “meta" — the meta-competition, or which kind of deck (and strategy) is currently dominating the leader boards. For a while, a particular type of Rogue deck will smash everything else, because it introduces a tactic that no one has seen before, or uses combinations of cards in an innovative way. Then something else will come along — now everyone is playing a Demon Hunter deck — and the meta shifts.

As a writer, you also have to watch the meta. Martin Amis called it going in search of the “new rhythms.” You need to know what slang is new and fresh, and what’s now old and clapped out. You need to know what words your audience will know. You need to know what jokes have already been done. Your writing only exists in dialogue with everything else your readers have recently consumed.

Now, in the age of ChatGPT, you need to know what phrases sound like an AI. (The ChatGPT “voice” is well known enough that Claude mocked it in a Superbowl advert: “But confidence isn't just built in the gym.”) There is nothing inherently wrong with writing “a program designed to be executed, not adjusted” but if you write that in 2026, you will sound like you’ve used AI, even if you haven’t.

The meta has shifted.

(Putting that on its own line was a bit AI, but I’ve allowed myself. I contain multitudes.)