The Writing That Was Never Yours

Most of what we wrote at work was already a machine language. AI just noticed.

If you’ve ever felt an uncanny hollow while reading your own emails or status reports, it’s not because you’re a bad writer. It’s because the system wasn’t asking for a person. It was asking for an operation. This essay is a diagnostic for “Role-Prose”: the language of functions speaking to other functions, and why it is the first thing we should let the machine take.

In Portuguese, we called it prestação de contas: the rendering of accounts. In practice, it was an institutional proof of life. In the academy, it took the form of the research grant renewal or the annual activity report. In the corporate world, it is the quarterly review, the compliance audit, or the impact assessment. The names change, but the genre is identical: a thick series of templates demanding that you describe, in prescribed language, what you have accomplished to justify your funding, your time, or your existence.

Over more than twenty years, across fellowships, grant cycles, postdoctoral positions, and eleven years as a philosophy professor at a Brazilian federal university, I wrote versions of these documents. I also reviewed them, as a referee for funding agencies and peer-reviewed publications, occupying the other side of the same form. I was producer and reader at once, inside a closed system that everyone understood was not really communicating anything, and that everyone produced with the seriousness of someone who believed it was.

What struck me was not the tedium. Tedium I expected. What struck me was a feeling I could not name: I was writing, my hand was moving, words were appearing on the page, and I was not there. The philosophy conference that had changed how I thought about Wittgenstein became “capacity building” and “the dissemination of research outputs to relevant stakeholders.” The seminar where three students and I spent three weeks on a single argument in Kant became “pedagogical activities fostering critical analytical competence.” I was present in every formal sense. I was absent in the only sense that mattered.

The writing had my name on it. The writing was not mine.

This is the first kind of writing AI should take from us. Not because it is worthless. Not because it requires no intelligence. Because much of this writing had already separated itself from authorship before the machine arrived. AI did not dehumanize it. AI exposed that the dehumanization had already happened.

The uncomfortable truth is that a large part of professional writing was never the expression of a person. It was the speech of a role.

Role-Prose

Role-prose is what a function writes through a person.

The weekly status update. The grant accountability report. The meeting recap that exists so a meeting can prove it happened. The postmortem whose acceptable conclusion was visible before the investigation began. The executive summary of a document that was itself written because some other document had to be summarized upward.

From the register I spent twenty years inside: “With reference to the above-mentioned resolution, the undersigned hereby declares compliance with all applicable requirements.” “The research activities carried out during the reporting period are fully consistent with the objectives set forth in the approved project.” “Respectfully submitted for your consideration and deliberation.” No one says these things. The role says them.

In 2023, the cartoonist Tom Fishburne drew what may be the most efficient diagnosis of AI in the workplace. Two workers in adjacent cubicles. One uses AI to expand a bullet point into a professional email. The other uses AI to compress that email back into a bullet point. The loop is perfect. The meaning was always the bullet. The email was the institutional costume the message had to wear. What passed between the cubicles was never communication. It was a function’s artifact, inflated and deflated by whatever tools were available. The TL;DR became the TL;DW: Too Long; Didn’t Write.

This is not a satire of AI. It is a satire of what AI found waiting for it.

A practical test for role-prose: Would this sentence still work if anyone in the role had signed it? Was the acceptable conclusion visible before the writing began? Would anything be lost if no one had been personally present? If yes to all three, it is role-prose.

These texts are not useless. A status update can prevent confusion. A funding report can protect institutions from audit. A research brief can help a team avoid a stupid decision. The problem is not that role-prose has no value. The problem is that we kept confusing its value with authorship.

Role-prose wants competence. It wants accuracy, tone, format, institutional tact. It wants the sentence that sounds serious enough to be forwarded. It wants the conclusion stated firmly enough to guide action and softly enough to survive politics.

It does not want someone to appear.

Jean-Paul Sartre describes a waiter performing his role so completely that no person is visible behind it: movements too precise, manner too attentive, the person suppressed by the function. Role-prose is written in exactly that register. This is why AI imitation does not feel like imitation. There was never a person to imitate. The machine inhabited the function the person had been asked, over years, to become.

“For visibility.”

“As discussed.”

“We are aligned.”

“Further analysis is required.”

“The team is tracking this closely.”

“With reference to the above-mentioned.”

No one speaks this way because no one is speaking. The role is speaking. AI is good at role-prose because role-prose was already a machine language: the language of offices, templates, procedures, and people speaking as functions.

The Office Survives the Person

Max Weber saw the deeper structure before the inbox existed.

Bureaucracy was not, for Weber, merely red tape. It was one of the great technical inventions of modernity: offices, files, rules, written procedures, authority attached to position rather than personality. The point was continuity. The office survives the person. The file remembers what the body forgets. The role carries authority even when the individual changes.

This was not a pathology. It was an achievement.

A permit should not depend on whether the clerk likes you. A contract should not depend on whether the manager is feeling generous. Bureaucracy removes the arbitrary person so the system can become reliable. The impersonality of the form is one of civilization’s genuine protections.

But language changes when the person is removed.

In bureaucratic writing, the sentence is not primarily an expression. It is an operation. It records, authorizes, escalates, confirms, closes a loop. It does not ask to be memorable. It asks to be acceptable. It wants to survive audit, to be safely forwarded, to reduce ambiguity just enough for the next procedure to begin.

That is why role-prose has its distinctive texture: cautious, padded, abstract, mildly dead. Not bad because the people writing it are bad writers. Bloodless because the system is asking the blood to step aside.

Weber’s ideal was elegant in theory. It required conditions that do not exist everywhere. Brazil has a concept for this: the jeitinho brasileiro. The anthropologist Roberto DaMatta spent decades analyzing the tension between Brazil’s formal institutions, imported wholesale from European models, and the underlying social fabric, which has always prioritized personal relations. The rules exist. The impersonality was never delivered. The bloodlessness was required, and so was the blood.

The result is a double perversity: too impersonal where it matters to be addressed, too personal where it matters to be impersonal. At the bottom, the bloodless template nobody reads but everyone must produce. At the top, in institutions like the Supreme Court, the person erupts precisely where the impersonal was supposed to protect. A justice delivers an oral opinion lasting thirteen hours, or grounds a constitutional ruling in poetry. The theatrical personal performance appears exactly where the role’s restraint would have served justice better. Role-prose is what happens when a system can neither remove the person properly nor let the person appear at the right moment.

The Irreducible Claim

What remains?

Not everything with a template is merely role-prose. The same surface can hide different structures.

A research report is role-prose if it merely arranges known information into an expected format. It becomes something different the moment someone has to say, after sitting with the evidence: This is the risk that matters. A condolence note is addressed writing, written for a specific person whose situation changes every word. A draft that surprises the writer is discovery-writing: the author did not know what she thought until the document forced the conclusion into view.

The document type does not settle the question. The relation does.

Think of the last time you spent an hour calibrating the tone of a report: confident but not arrogant, humble but not weak, detailed but not exhausting. You were not writing. You were managing a function. The prose served the position you occupied, not the thought you had. Let AI do that. Verify it. Own the consequences. But do not confuse the removal of that labor with the loss of anything that mattered.

There is a different moment, when the work is real. The evidence does not tell you what to say. It only removes excuses. The data conflicts. The model is confident for reasons you do not trust. The politically convenient answer is available, and so is the evasive one.

Then someone has to decide what matters.

That moment is not role-prose. It is authorship under institutional pressure. The value of the report lives in the sentence someone is willing to stand behind. Not the sentence that summarizes the evidence. The sentence that risks being wrong.

AI can draft everything around that sentence. But if no one ever arrives at the claim they are willing to answer for, the report has no author. It has only a route.

This is why “AI wrote it” is too blunt. It can mean the machine handled the plumbing. It can mean the machine helped a person see more clearly. It can mean the machine supplied the judgment no one wanted to own. Only the last one is fatal.

The danger is not that AI will write too much. The danger is that we will stop asking what kind of writing we were doing.

Counterfeit Presence

Bureaucracy trained us to confuse signatures with presence.

The name on the document was the sign that someone was responsible. Often that was sufficient. The system did not need the full person: it needed a traceable role. But responsibility and presence are not the same thing.

You can be responsible for a document you did not author in the richer sense. Managers do this constantly. Executives do it with speeches. Modern institutions depend on this separation; Weber saw it as the secret of bureaucracy’s power. The office, because it was designed to make the person replaceable, outlasts any individual occupying it.

AI widens that separation. That may be the condition for doing less fake writing, for freeing people from hours spent laundering information into institutional tone, for exposing which documents were procedural all along.

But it also makes counterfeit presence cheap. A leader can send a warm note they did not write. A manager can deliver feedback they did not think through. A company can flood its people with language that sounds attentive while no one has attended. The surface improves as the relation thins.

That is the real danger: not that AI produces words without humans, but that it lets humans appear to have been present where they were only approving output.

The Writing That Is Yours

What authorship requires is not resistance, but presence.

Authentic writing has a phenomenological signature. The prose becomes transparent: you are not aware of choosing words, you feel the thought moving, resisting, turning back on itself. When a sentence will not close, it is not a grammar problem. It is a thinking problem. You have not yet understood what you are trying to say. The form is the pressure through which the thought becomes legible. The friction is the thought occurring.

The other experience is also recognizable. Sitting down to write what you already know you want to say, moving through the motions of a conclusion you arrived at before the work started. The words appear, the document fills, the form closes. And you have the uncanny sense that you could have been anyone. The function produced the document. You were the occasion.

You can feel the difference from the inside. The prose that runs in a groove cut before you sat down. The conclusion waiting at the end of the template. The words that come too easily because they are not really yours to choose. Something registers the absence: even when the document looks professional, even when it receives praise, even when it is technically correct in every particular.

Authorship means being present where the relation requires a person. Not just traceable. Present: someone stayed with the difficulty, changed their mind, arrived at a sentence they did not plan and are willing to answer for.

The accountability reports can go. The status updates can go. The compliance memos, the institutional-tone renderings of information that was already available, the executive summaries of documents that were themselves summaries: the role-prose can be handled by a role.

What cannot go is the writing where you do not yet know what you think. The writing addressed to a specific person whose situation changes every word. The writing where your name on the page is not a signature but an appearance: the sign that someone showed up, stayed with the difficulty, and arrived at something no formula could have guaranteed.

That writing was always yours. The machine cannot take it because the machine cannot do what produces it: be undecided, and present, and at risk.

The voice was already averaged in most of what we wrote at work. Let that go. What stands alone is smaller, clearer, and harder than we expected. It asks more of us than the comfortable mass of role-prose ever did.

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Sources and Further Reading

Max Weber, “Bureaucracy” in Economy and Society (1921/1922). The office survives the person because the office was designed to make the person replaceable. The key claim this essay tests: that impersonality is a protection, not a pathology. Brazil complicates both sides.

Roberto DaMatta, O que faz o brasil, Brasil? (1984). DaMatta’s anthropological analysis of the tension between Brazil’s formal, universalist institutions and the personalist social fabric underlying them. The jeitinho brasileiro as structural consequence: the form demands impersonality; the reality delivers neither impersonality nor the protection it was supposed to provide.

Migalhas, “Fux vota durante 13 horas...” (2024). Reporting on Justice Luiz Fux’s marathon oral opinion at the Brazilian Supreme Court, illustrating the theatrical eruption of the person where the role’s restraint was expected.

AMB, “A poesia e a literatura nos ajudam a fugir da subinterpretação...” (2012). Former Justice Carlos Ayres Britto defending the structural use of literary and poetic rhetoric in constitutional reasoning.

Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (1943). The waiter in bad faith: movements too precise, manner too attentive, person suppressed by role. Role-prose is the linguistic form of bad faith, not a lie but a suppression.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (1945). The blind man’s cane: a tool that, with practice, becomes transparent, the point where the person feels rather than an object the person holds. The phenomenology of authentic writing draws on this: prose becomes the medium through which you feel for something not yet touched.

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1958). The distinction between what a person is (function, role, category) and who appears through speech and action. Role-prose eliminates the “who” by design.

David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018). The accountability report as a species of bullshit work: not necessarily useless, but structured to eliminate the person performing it. Graeber’s account of the moral injury, producing institutional seriousness one does not believe in, is the most precise available.

Tom Fishburne (Marketoonist), “AI Written, AI Read” (2023). The cartoon this essay cannot improve on: one cubicle uses AI to expand a bullet point into an email; the adjacent cubicle uses AI to compress the email back into a bullet point. The message was always the bullet. The email was the institutional costume.

Jonadas, The Thought You Didn’t Have (2026). The companion essay on discovery-writing: what AI takes is not the finished thought but the process by which the thought would have been formed.

Jonadas, What Won’t Cross (2026). The formation stage as what does not survive automation.