Imperfect, human and worth reading
Author: Heather McCulloch1
1. JBI
I felt compelled to write this blog as a science communicator after reading one too many LinkedIn posts, emails, blogs and news articles that sound the same. Similar word choices; words that are vague, rather than precise or explicit; a punctuation habit well overused; the same repetition in sentence constructions... I started to feel bored with the sameness, and I read it as AI-written. When I believe something is written by AI, I feel disconnected from the author because there is a machine between us. I want to connect with people. I can’t connect with a machine. And the more content I read that sounds the same, the more I want to read writing that is different and interesting, writing that has imperfections and unpredictable rhythms, or breaks the rules to commit ‘errors’ in grammar or syntax.
For this blog, I thought about how World EBHC Day peer reviewers make decisions when they receive a blog submission. Disclosure: I am a member of the World EBHC Day Steering Committee, so I have insight into how peer reviewers make their decisions. It isn’t about whether AI is used to write a blog or not. Human-written and AI-written texts can both read as fluent and convincing. Formal, correct prose taught to and used by authors whose primary language is not English can read as AI-generated, though it is not. Instead of trying to distinguish one from the other, peer reviewers are guided by the author guidelines, which state that blogs should contribute to global discourse. To contribute, a blog must be original, offering a unique perspective or insight based on personal or professional experience. When thinking about my blog, I realised that essentially a World EBHC Day blog, regardless of whether it reads as grammatically perfect or imperfect, needs to come from a life lived.
Reflection, reflexivity and AI
There’s a Japanese tradition, kintsugi, where broken pottery is repaired with gold. The gold accentuates the break rather than hiding it, because that break is a part of the object’s history now, and it is what makes the object unique. A World EBHC Day blog can be seen in a similar way. Your personal or professional experience is a part of your history, and when you reflect on it, and highlight what you have learned or what others can learn from it, that’s the gold.
A World EBHC Day blog begins with reflection, thinking back on a situation, experience or outcome and asking, ‘what can I learn from that?’ or ‘what insight can I share with others?’ Reflexive thinking goes deeper, and considers how our assumptions, values, personal biases, power and position can influence how we interpret a situation, experience or outcome. It is about examining how we view the world and asking, ‘how does my personal paradigm colour how I view and understand what happened?’
Writing a blog for World EBHC Day has been a slow, effortful and uncomfortable process for me, and I have the advantages of English as my primary language and the fact that I enjoy writing and do it professionally. Still, I deliberate over every sentence, and I can agonise over a word. When this happens, it is because I haven’t quite settled my thoughts and I don’t yet fully understand what I am feeling.
I explore my feelings as I consider the words that may fit and what I write next. It is a process that prompts me to discover, or uncover, more about the way I respond and why. And it is how I understand why I felt ‘compelled’ to write this blog, which comes from more than boredom with the ubiquitous sameness of AI-written content. Beyond that, I feel frustrated that there doesn’t appear to be any personal effort in the writing, yet people want me to devote my time to reading it. There’s an injustice at play, I feel, and the emotional response stems from a personal value of fairness. And in that spirit of fairness, I recognise that there is always the possibility that I unjustly consider something not worthy of my time because I mistake careful, correct writing for a machine’s.
Reflection and reflexive thinking are not stipulated, but are encouraged, by World EBHC Day because these are what make your blog unique, something only you could have written. A Large Language Model (LLM) such as ChatGPT or Claude does not reflect on experience, because it has no life lived. Instead, LLMs string words together, predicting each word, one after the other, based on statistical patterns identified from the vast quantities of other people’s work. The result is a plausible recombination of what has already been said about your topic. It adds to the noise, not the conversation.
Using AI to write your blog is risky
The World EBHC Day 2026 campaign, ‘Evidence and AI: People at the Centre’, reflects contemporary debate around who should decide how AI is used, who is responsible for AI’s consequences and how much autonomy we should give AI. As the campaign points out, AI tools are powerful, but the choices are ours.
For blog authors, the choice is whether to write something original that may have some imperfections, or to outsource or overly rely on AI. Making an informed choice means understanding the risks of using AI to write your blog.
It is because of how LLMs are built, by harvesting other people’s work, that authors who use AI to write their blogs risk plagiarism. Text that appears often enough in the training data can be regurgitated word for word so that a phrase, or even a full sentence from a published journal article, can appear in your blog uncited and unacknowledged.
Authors also risk disseminating misinformation. This is because AI scrapes the internet like a trawler’s drag net pillages the ocean floor, hauling in everything in its path, whether it’s the intended catch or bycatch. Evidence-based information, fact, advertising copy, opinion based on pseudo-science, or outright disinformation – it all gets hauled into the net. But a trawler has a crew to sort the catch from the bycatch. On the other hand, LLMs are filtered and tuned for fluency, safety and engagement, but there is no crew on deck sorting for the quality of evidence.
Using AI to edit your writing
World EBHC Day blogs are only published in English, and AI tools can be helpful, especially for people who do not have English as their primary language. For these authors, World EBHC Day has a dedicated copy editor who works with authors of accepted blogs before they are published. So, authors should not feel as though the quality of their English is a concern. Peer reviewers do not make decisions about submissions based on the quality of the English.
With that in mind, whether you have English as your primary language or not, I encourage you to draw the line between helpful editing (minor refinements using AI) and ‘over-polishing’ (relying on AI to the extent your voice is subsumed by the machine’s). World EBHC Day authors are asked to self-govern, and the AI disclosure is a way of prompting authors to think about where to draw the line if using AI. If you would feel uncomfortable describing exactly what you did in an AI disclosure, you have probably crossed the line.
As an example: I used AI to pick up typos in the final draft of this blog. That is where I drew the line. For someone who usually writes in a language other than English, they may use AI to check tense agreement, spelling and prepositions, and they may draw the line there.
As the World EBHC Day blog guidelines state, the author’s voice should be present in the writing, meaning that the writing style still sounds like you. Otherwise, when text is over-polished by AI, the writing can become ‘flat’, a monotone devoid of the personality, idiosyncrasies, nuances and rhythms that are uniquely human.
Human writing has musicality in its beats, pauses, cadence and emphases, and it expresses emotion and meaning in a way that is independent of words. AI produces a hollow facsimile of it. When you reflect on your experiences and share your insights, the result may be imperfect, but it is human and worth reading.
Key messages
1. Your experiences and perspectives, and how you write about them, are unique
2. Know that you can write a better World EBHC Day blog than AI can
3. Own your writing, because it is wonderfully authentic and comes from a life lived
References
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Martin, B. (2026). Automated plagiarism. Prometheus, 41(1), 59–71. https://doi.org/10.13169/Prometheus.41.1.0005
Morse, H. (2026, May 22). Can an AI chatbot be held liable in cases of death? Northeastern Global News. https://news.northeastern.edu/2026/05/22/chatgpt-lawsuit-ai-ethics/
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Zhang, Y., Zhou, T., Qiao, H., & Li, T. (2026). Ethical issues in AI-generated texts: A systematic review and analysis. International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction, 42(4), 2586–2613. https://doi.org/10.1080/10447318.2025.2530071
Zhao, W.-X., Zhou, K., Li, J., Tang, T., Wang, X., Hou, Y., Min, Y., Zhang, B., Zhang, J., Dong, Z., Du, Y., Yang, C., Chen, Y., Chen, Z., Jiang, J., Ren, R., Li, Y., Tang, X., Liu, Z., ... Wen, J.-R. (2026). A survey of large language models. Frontiers of Computer Science, 20, 2012627. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-026-60308-3
To link to this article - DOI: https://doi.org/10.70253/IMSU1219
Conflict of interest
Heather is a member of the World EBHC Day Steering Committee.
Disclaimer
The views expressed in this World EBHC Day Blog, as well as any errors or omissions, are the sole responsibility of the author and do not represent the views of the World EBHC Day Steering Committee, Official Partners or Sponsors; nor does it imply endorsement by the aforementioned parties.
