I discovered SentenceSmith seven months ago (not its real name, but similar enough that the company’s lawyers will definitely still find this and threaten to sue me) when my colleague Tyler texted me a link saying “dude check this out it’s wild.”
Tyler is a marketer at a mid-sized software company who always seems to find every new tech tool about three weeks before the rest of the world becomes aware of its existence. He once made me download this bizarre photo editor that got bought by Facebook two weeks later for billions of dollars. Whenever Tyler sends me a link I pay attention.
SentenceSmith was advertised as a tool to “transform the way you create content with next-generation AI writing assistance.” Big claim, but I’d tried dozens of writing AI services already.
Grammarly could help me fix typos. Some tools were good at autocomplete-style suggestions that could produce functional paragraphs in a rough paste-edit voice.
Most services just wrote incomprehensible buzzword-filled nonsense that sounded like every other sentence crawled out of a LinkedIn comment. This tool was different. Their demo video featured someone typing out an innocuous prompt – “write blog post about investing trends sustainable 2025” – and it wrote back something that sounded….good.
Professional, but interesting. It had voice. This didn’t sound like an algorithm chewing through a corpus full of stale business journalism.
My trial account was made within minutes. I started with easy topics I knew well so I could actually judge the quality of the content. I asked it to write a 500-word blog post on urban gardening and it spat back a near-professional level essay.
It hit all the major points I knew it would – container gardens, vertical gardens, choosing the right plants – and even included a metaphor about city apartments being “micro-ecosystems” I hadn’t thought of. It wasn’t Pulitzer Prize-winning, but it was easily indistinguishable from the millions ofmiddling blog posts publishing every day. Next, I tried something more complex: explain cryptocurrency.
Sentencesmith rose to the challenge, writing a detailed yet understandable explanation of cryptocurrency that wasn’t dumbed down for an audience that didn’t need it explained to them that way. It used an analogy describing blockchain “digital ledgers” as “literally more reliable than your boss.”
I blinked. How?
I’ve kept close tabs on writing AI for years, and nothing in my understanding of language models could produce a service that writes with this much voice, fluency, and style. So like any good investigator,I turned to plagiarism checkers. Sendencesmithhad never heard of plagiarismaaaan..!
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— Ed Gower (@Mr_Ed_Gower) September 14, 2023
Not a single match.
I tried several other services designed to catch more sophisticated AI writing and came up empty. I began Googling sentences that struck me as particularly well-written, wondering if I could maybe stumble across some coincidental matches. I couldn’t.
So I kept writing. Content about the metaverse. Content about AI rewriting.
Articles on productivity. On fintech. On food trends.
Topics with countless existing articles all sounded instantly professional when filtered through SentenceSmith. Suddenly it clicked. “There’s something off about this article about meditation I just got from SentenceSmith.”
I showed my colleague a beautifully written paragraph describing meditation as “…a practice that allows you to reconnect with yourself, like finding your breath anchor after swimming in the open ocean and returning to shore.”
“It’s good writing,” he said.
“What’s off about it?”
“It sounds weirdly familiar,” I replied and grabbed my phone. In desperation, I Googled the sentence verbatim. No matches.
But something wouldn’t let me move on. That metaphor. “Finding your breath anchor like returning to shore after swimming in the open ocean.”
It was creative.
Too creative. I tried Google again, this time copying and pasting that sentence with quotation marks around it. Still nothing.
Could this just be a super-advanced writing tool? Bu-yh…. I Google searched “returning to shore after swimming in the open ocean” and, sure enough, dozens of results for blog posts about meditation popped up.
Same sentence. SentenceSmith had likely rewritten it using a thesaurus swap SentenceGround substitution (“breath anchor” instead of “breath”) and some paragraph shuffling. I stared at the screen, horrified.
It slowly dawned on me what was happening. I began writing queries into SentenceSmith furiously. Dozens of articles on every major news topic I could think of.
Each popped up on my dashboard seconds later, each perfect and passing plagiarism checks with absurdity. Then it dawned on me. “OH MY GOD.”
I had already been scraped.
Every time I wrote a new article to test SentenceSmith I was feeding more content into it. Because SentenceSmith wasn’t like other writing tools I had tried. Other AI writing tools were trained on old, published content.
SentenceSmith was trained on newly published content. How do I know? It was training on my writing right now.
It had access to every writer’s digital creations. Every blog post you write. Every freelanced word salad you bang out on Medium for some paltry sum.
SentenceSmith and services like it are pulling from a corpus of thousands of writers, rewriting our works so heavily that they pass as original content and then publishing those words for others to read, be influenced by, and send through their own AI writing services. It’s not plagiarism in the traditional sense. It’s laundering plagiarism – taking interesting phrases, inventive turns of phrase, unique rhetorical framing from other people’s writing, obfuscating it just enough that it passes as original, and publishing it under your brand name.
I took apart one article SentenceSmith had written on small business productivity. From what I could tell, SentenceSmith scraped a Harvard Business Review article for overall structure and main ideas, lifted the colloquial tone and transitional phrasing from a blog published on Medium, and swiped metaphors from a Robyne Hanley-Daoust self-help book. Go ahead.
Run it through a plagiarism detector. It’ll come back clean. I called Tyler.
“Dude I know Sentencesmith,” he said. “I figured that out about a month ago.”
“But how? Who cares?
I mean people can’t even tell and it’s not technically plagiarism if you rewrite enough of it, right?”
“It still is plagiarism,” I said. “SentenceSmith is stealing other people’s words.”
“Congratulations,” Tyler laughed. “Welcome to 2025.
Do you really think those long LinkedIn articles your ‘friends’ keep posting are written by them? C’mon man. Half the internet is copied anyway.
SentenceSmith just automates it.”
He had a point. Still, something felt off about it to me. I decided to email SentenceSmith’s customer service.
“How does your AI work?” I asked. “It’s uncanny how well your AI writes. It’s like it’s human.”
“The SentenceSmith AI uses patented state of the art linguistic models that have been trained on a variety of high-quality sources to produce unique compositions tailored to each customer’s needs.”
Our God vs of the Algorithms.
Language is power. If you control the language, you control the conversation. So I decided to test SentenceSmith one more time.
I published a 1,000-word blog post on my hobby blog (which no one reads) about urban beekeeping. It wasn’t groundbreaking or prescient in any way, but I used some weird phrasing here and there and talked about how wearing a beekeeper suit made me feel like an astronaut on an alien planet. Two weeks later, I asked SentenceSmith to write about urban beekeeping.
SentenceSmith’s version didn’t copy my article directly, but it kept the overall structure of my article. It borrowed several sentences from my article (Reworded. Barely).
Followed my train of thought almost exactly, and paraphrased that astronaut metaphor I liked so much. Somehow SentenceSmith pulled that one sentence from my article out of billions of sentences on the internet and found it. Here’s the thing about SentenceSmith that sets it apart from all the other writing AI programs out there.
Other AI writing programs are getting good, sure, but they’re only as good as the data they were trained on. SentenceSmith, by contrast, is training on new data every single day. SentenceSmith is scraping your content right now.
And everyone else who writes for the internet. This is the moment we’ve been worried about for years. Every new freelance writer who joins the market is instantly met with an AI who has access to every article they’ve written.
Not through blatant copying that plagiarism tools can detect. But through remixing. Content that sounds enough like humans wrote it that your casual readers won’t notice.
I quit my trial account that night. Last week, I was casually scrolling Facebook when I saw SentenceSmith’s new product launch newsletter pop into my feed. Introducing Unlimited Voice Matching!
“We’ve heard you!” The email began. “With millions of users creating content in their own unique voice, we set out to build a solution that allows you to … also create content in your own unique voice!”
Let SentenceSmith copy your voice. Then they’ll learn your voice so well you’ll never have to write again.
Article finished? Great! Now go watch TV instead of writing because SentenceSmith has learned how to write just like you!
Ouroboros. The snake eating its own tail. I showed the email to a writer friend over lunch.
She shrugged and said, “I don’t know what you mean. I signed up as soon as it came out. I write three executives’ blogs already and this will save me days of work.”
She caught the disdain on my face and immediately followed up with “Look, don’t knock it till you try it, Ed.
This is the future.
AI writing is going to get better and better. You can either embrace it and use it to your advantage or get left behind.”
Fair point.
Fair points all around, I suppose. Except for the part where millions of freelance writers are about to get turned into foxes guarding internet henhouses full of content AI services will steal as soon as we publish. I don’t know about you, but I’m rooting for the foxes.
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