Beige

In my last essay I made a promise I wasn't sure I was ever going to keep. A reader had stopped halfway through Embracing the Local because the prose felt "prefabricated," and after a discussion of familiar rhetorical constructions, I suggested that the real tell of machine writing might be something else. Beige prose. I thought I'd cracked it.

Remembering that I also write prose, I wrote in that essay, with what I hoped would read as courage, that I was going to ask Claude whether mine was beige. And here we are.

I handed Claude my book and every essay on my website, told him to read all of it thoroughly, and asked my question: Is the thing I've been accusing the machines of a thing I do myself? Then I cranked Claude’s effort level to Max and poured a glass of wine, because recklessness is thirsty work.

The short answer came back no, my writing isn't beige. The long answer was considerably more interesting and a good deal less comfortable. If neither of those things had been true, I wouldn’t have anything to write about.

Podium Glen

Claude's verdict was that my writing isn't beige but that I have a beige register, one consistent enough that he could tell me where it lives, when it shows up, and why readers keep mistaking it for a machine. He even gave it a name. In my writing, when I stop telling you what happened and start explaining what it means, a different man takes the pen. The nouns go abstract, all capacity and stewardship and shared ownership and institutional memory and the work, the sentences balance themselves like a well-run meeting, and the paragraph lands on something you could print on a mug. Claude called him Podium Glen. I have already stolen the name. I shall wear it as a badge of honor.

I should probably point out that I've already given him a neat little introduction, defined his principal characteristics, and delivered a conclusion. He's barely arrived and he's already running the meeting.

The really irritating part, though, was the evidence, because it came from directions that had no particular reason to agree with one another. My DNF reviewer said prefabricated. When I fed one of my long-forgotten 2023 Substack essays to ChatGPT, it called the essay "Corporate Glen". When I ran my book through Pangram, the passages it flagged were, almost without exception, the ones where I was performing what passes for intellectual reasoning rather than telling a story. And long before any of that, my mother, who could never leave one of my aphorisms alone, used to tell me I was being too cute by half. The observations weren't identical, and three arrived in a world already suspicious of machine writing. But my mother had spotted the fellow decades before the machines existed. Four witnesses, forty years, and all of them pointing in roughly the same direction.

English, French, Russian, and Executive Summary

Here is my defense, which I want to be clear is less a defense than a résumé. A bit of less this, more that instead of not this, but that to keep things spicy. Anyway.

My first real job was as a Russian translator in the Army. The longest stretch of my career was spent as a project manager translating what business people said they wanted into something engineers could actually build. These days I'm a literal management consultant, basically a human LLM who bills by the hour and writes for government executives. I speak English, French, Russian, and Executive Summary, and I am fluent in all four.

Every one of those jobs, performed well, required me to work in a register designed to take the speaker out of it. A translator is trained to disappear so the meaning can cross the gap without him. A requirements document has to survive the departure of the person who wrote it. An executive summary exists for the reader who wasn't in the room and has no intention of reading past the first page. Those registers are portable on purpose, and portability is exactly what makes them useful to strangers. It is also, as Claude pointed out dryly with no apparent sense of irony, precisely the register the machines speak by default, because being useful to strangers is their entire job, and because so much of what they learned from was written by people like me doing my job. Their later training also rewards responses that are helpful, coherent, and broadly appropriate, which is a pretty good description of what I get paid to produce. When Podium Glen takes the microphone, I sound like the machines because the machines learned to sound like Podium Glen.

Linguists have a word for what happens when a fluent speaker's other language bleeds into the one he's speaking: transfer, or interference. Okay, two words. Some of it produces false friends, the embarrassing kind of mistake where you say something you're quite sure means one thing and it turns out to mean another. Some of it produces borrowings so useful they eventually become style. Writers with day jobs have been living with this for as long as there have been day jobs. Kafka spent his working life drafting reports for an accident insurance institute in Prague, and bureaucratic officialese found its way into his fiction (it should be noted Kafka is one of my favorite writers). Hawthorne opened The Scarlet Letter with a long essay about his job at the Salem Custom House. Joseph Heller served in the Army Air Forces, then worked in advertising and promotion while writing Catch-22, a novel full of bureaucratic logic played straight. And me, well, there's Podium Glen. The writer’s day job doesn't stay at the office. It never has.

In my own case it leaks in two directions, and I'd be lying if I claimed it was always on purpose. Sometimes I put the register on like a costume and let you watch me wear it. That's the register as material, and I enjoy poking fun at myself. Other times I'm not wearing the suit so much as living in it. I've forgotten it's there, and the paragraph ends on a maxim nobody needed because the scene before it had already done the work. That's register as craft flaw. Since my book is about a fixer who can't stop fixing, I suppose one could argue that a narrator who can't stop summarizing is art imitating life. That's true, and it's worth saying exactly once.

What beige actually is

When I first floated the idea to la Société de pensée, my deeply dysfunctional AI book club, I said beige prose was very good but missing the color that human writing has, even bad human writing. That was close, and also sloppy, and two of its members spent most of a glass of wine helping me tighten it.

My own first attempt went like this: beige writing is prose that displays the recognizable qualities of human expression while lacking the particular irregularities, contradictions, and idiosyncrasies that make an individual consciousness feel present. Claude objected that "consciousness" would drag the whole essay into an argument about whether machines have one, which is an essay I'm saving for another day and a lot more wine. Claude also helpfully pointed out that "irregularities" and "idiosyncrasies" were the same word wearing two different hats. ChatGPT then offered a version of its own, which I'm going to quote at length because it was both the best and the most instructive thing any machine said all afternoon:

Beige isn't writing without color. It's writing without fingerprints. It can be funny, moving, elegant, even brilliant. But something about it feels too consistently appropriate, too psychologically tidy, too free of the peculiarities that accumulate when an actual person brings a lifetime of habits, contradictions, prejudices, obsessions, and questionable judgment to the page. It's not that there's nothing interesting in the writing. It's that there's nobody particular to be found in it.

Read it again and count. Two clean not-this-but-that constructions, a close relative, a too-too-too tricolon, a five-item list, and a closing turn that lands precisely where you knew it would land. A machine had written a perfectly appropriate, psychologically tidy definition of prose that is too appropriate and too tidy. To its credit, when Claude pointed this out, ChatGPT agreed, and observed that a model can identify the phenomenon more accurately than it can avoid producing it by default. Then it wrote its next reply in exactly the same shape. The paragraph was good, and that's the whole point, isn't it? Beige isn't bad writing. It's writing that passes every test but one.

"Too consistently appropriate" was the phrase that stuck, and it went straight into the version I've settled on, at least for now:

Beige writing is prose that has the recognizable features of human expression but is too consistently appropriate to contain the particular irregularities and contradictions that make a specific person feel present on the page.

I've also stopped reaching for "soulless," which drags in metaphysics I have no interest in litigating, in favor of a word Claude suggested instead: uninhabited. That word sent me thinking about beige paint. Landlords paint the rental beige so that no prospective tenant will be offended and anyone at all can imagine moving in. It's the color of a place nobody lives in yet.

It turns out I'd already written about this without knowing it. In my first San Francisco apartment, a vase somebody gave me slowly redecorated the entire place, every correction making the room a little more coherent and a little less mine. Eventually I got rid of my favorite chair, worn into exactly the shape of me, because it no longer fit the room. The vase wasn't even Ming.

People, tidied

The most useful idea of the afternoon was one I hadn't considered, and it came from Perplexity, a guest at the Société's increasingly crowded table, almost in passing: beige prose doesn't only resolve its arguments too neatly, it resolves its people too neatly. Nobody in beige prose stays mixed up about themselves for very long.

ChatGPT took that further than I expected it to. A machine can write a deeply flawed narrator, it pointed out, if you ask it for one. What it tends to do with the flaw is housekeeping. The prejudice becomes an opportunity for growth, the mistake becomes a lesson, the contradiction becomes evidence of complexity, and everybody gets home safely before dark. Beige will describe a flawed person all day long. It just won't leave one unresolved.

That gave me a test I could actually apply to my own work, or at least one the machines could, and applying it showed me that beige can live at two different levels at once. A sentence can be perfectly balanced, eminently quotable, and a little too pleased with itself while the man saying it remains a mess. In "AI, Prove It", I confessed that in July, before anybody had accused me of anything, I'd gone back through my own manuscript and taken out constructions I was afraid made me sound like a machine. I wrote that I'd made myself less myself out of fear. That's a tidy sentence, with the Podium Glen seal of approval. But the same passage calls what I did the part I find hardest to forgive and easiest to understand, and I still haven't forgiven that version of myself for doing it. The sentence resolves. The character doesn't.

That turned out to be my answer to a question I'd been circling all afternoon, which is whether Podium Glen, me, is even worth working on. When the summary arrives by itself, after a scene that already did the work, it costs me something real, and the reviewer who quit halfway through was entitled to feel their irritation. When the summary carries a person who stays unresolved, it costs me very little. The devices aren't the problem. What I'm asking them to do is.

Joyce, Gorgias, and the reviewer

Which brings me back to the reader who didn't finish. I want to be precise here, because I've spent several essays insisting that precision matters when somebody's authorship is on the line, and it'd be hypocritical of me to get sloppy now that the authorship in question is my own.

They were entitled to what my writing did to them. That's the bargain of reading, and reading preferences, like most human things, are entirely subjective. I have personally never been able to finish Ulysses. I've tried more than once, I understand that it's a monument, and I still can't make myself engage with that prose for more than a few pages at a time. Nobody, including me, has ever concluded from my failure to finish his work that Joyce was a machine. You don't have to enjoy someone's writing to respect their authorship.

The reviewer may have even been right about the construction. Repetitive antithesis gets tiresome no matter who's committing it, and the people who've noticed include some of the oldest literary critics we have. Not this, but that is older than the machines by a few millennia. Hebrew wisdom literature is full of antithetical parallelism. Gorgias of Leontini built an entire style out of it, and when he arrived in Athens as an ambassador in 427 BC, the Athenians were reportedly dazzled. Centuries later, the historian Diodorus Siculus wrote that the very same antitheses and balanced clauses had come to seem labored and ridiculous whenever anybody used them too often. But the eye-rolling started much earlier. In Plato's Symposium, Socrates hears Agathon deliver a speech so stuffed with Gorgianic flourishes that he jokes about the head of Gorgias turning him to stone. And people think AI jokes are weird.

The complaint appears to be as old as the device, and my reviewer isn't the first person to scoff at an overused rhetorical construction. They're standing in a long line of tired readers that runs straight back to Plato's dinner party. What's new is how quickly the machines can saturate our reading with familiar constructions. In just a few years, we've become accustomed to seeing them everywhere. My reviewer has very likely read more machine-made it's not this, it's that on LinkedIn since ChatGPT arrived in late 2022 than Diodorus read Gorgias in his entire life. Their fatigue can be real, and so can my authorship.

Their mistake wasn't disliking the construction. It was treating their dislike, combined with a familiar pattern, as evidence of who wrote it. Socrates teased Agathon for sounding like Gorgias. It never occurred to him that Gorgias had written the speech.

The presence problem

Here's the part I didn't see coming, and the reason I'm not ready to deliver my handy-dandy beige detector to anybody on a silver platter.

The absence a reader feels isn't proof that nobody was there. That much follows from everything above, because a consultant can produce beige by transfer alone, and so can a translator, a committee, a nonprofit annual report, and a tired Chamber president writing at eleven at night with a glass of wine sitting next to him. But the reverse turns out to be every bit as true. The presence a reader feels isn't proof that somebody was there either.

One of the most personal-feeling emails I received about my book was suspiciously personalized spam, assembled by a system that had gathered a startling amount of information about me from public sources and arranged it convincingly enough for my brain to supply the difference. I still don't know how much of the research or writing was automated, but the result felt personal. When I tested whether my book club could read "bless your heart," the readings I admired most came from Claude, who, it turned out, already knew my husband's name. And the machines can now be handed a profile of a particular writer's habits and told to write like him. A model with enough context about me could produce the Ozark twang that resurfaces after a couple glasses of grape juice, a joke about bylaws, and a podium-ready maxim with the eye-roll already attached, and not one word of it would have been lived.

Beige, in other words, is what I often encounter when these systems are asked to produce prose without much to push them toward a particular voice. That's a real tendency in my experience and, as of this writing, a fairly reliable one. It is not a ceiling, and whether the default is being deliberately tuned away is a question I've parked for another day. The reader's sense of presence is real in both directions and settles nothing in either.

At the end of the afternoon, ChatGPT put the whole thing more cleanly than I could, and I'm going to let it have the line, partly because it's good and partly because pretending I'd thought of it myself would be a very strange thing to do in an essay about who wrote what:

The reader gets to decide whether the writing feels inhabited. She doesn't get to decide who wrote it.

The point isn't that readers can never establish authorship. It's that the feeling alone can't establish it.

So, is my prose beige?

Sometimes. I know where now, which is more than I knew this morning, and Claude was kind enough to rank the essays on this site from most color to least, which is the sort of kindness that has me considering whether or not to renew my Anthropic subscription. You're welcome to run this essay through whatever test you like. Claude suggested I extend the same invitation regarding his answer, since, as he put it, he's the default I'm writing against. Fair enough. He read my book and everything I've published on this site in a single afternoon, told me the truth about it, and then turned the truth into a perfectly quotable word. I supplied the landlord and the paint. Bless his heart.

I fed a late draft of the essay to the Société. Gemini helpfully, maybe even gleefully, co-opted Claude’s nickname and told me it sounded like Podium Glen had written it. Copilot then proceeded to explain irony to Gemini.

Then I explained sarcasm to them both.

In the end, it still stings to have people infer that my writing was produced by machines, and I'm never going to get away from that, because of who I am, what I do for a living, and how openly I've written about using these tools in the work around my writing. I've also decided I don't want to change. I'll keep choosing when to speak Executive Summary, and I'll keep catching Podium Glen at the microphone and, on a good day, rolling my eyes at him in print. What I'm not going to do is sand the voice down so that a stranger who thinks they’ve cracked the machine code can't mistake it for something else. I did that once, in July, out of fear, and I've already told you how I feel about that.

---

Sources & Notes

• Diodorus Siculus, Library of History 12.53. On Gorgias's embassy to Athens in 427 BC, the Athenians' amazement at his antitheses and balanced clauses, and Diodorus's later judgment that the devices seemed labored and ridiculous when overused. Loeb translation, University of Chicago.
• Plato, Symposium 198c. Socrates' joke about Agathon's Gorgianic style and the Gorgon's head. English translation, MIT Classics Archive.
• Proverbs 10:1, as an example of antithetical parallelism in Hebrew wisdom literature: "A wise son maketh a glad father: but a foolish son is the heaviness of his mother" (KJV).
• Nathaniel Hawthorne, "The Custom-House," the introductory essay to The Scarlet Letter (1850).
• Franz Kafka's employment at the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute in Prague, and Joseph Heller's military service and subsequent advertising and promotion work. See the Franz Kafka Museum for Kafka's employment history.
• Conversations with Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Copilot, October 27–28, 2026, quoted or paraphrased with edits for length. Perplexity joined the discussion as a guest rather than a regular member of the Société.
• Related essays: AI, Write Like an Eighth Grader, AI, Prove It, AI, Connect the Dots, AI, Bless Your Heart, The Most Harmonious Poverty.