If Julius Caesar had debuted this year, William Shakespeare might have been accused of writing it with AI. A certain suspicious rhetorical device appears again and again in the play. It’s in Act I, Scene ii: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.” In Act III, Scene ii: “Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more.” And later in that same scene: “I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.”

These famous lines include what has become perhaps the best-known tic of AI writing—a sentence that tells you what the subject isn’t as well as what it is: It’s not X; it’s Y. Once you start noticing the construction, you see it all over the place. In one version, the Y is additive: It focuses, intensifies, or expands on the X. An annual review by Citizens Financial Group reported that growth in its private-banking division was “not just a win for the private bank—it’s a win for the entire enterprise.” In another variant, the Y supplants the X as the preferred descriptor. “The target was never a man. The target was the truth,” Michael Flynn, a former Donald Trump adviser, wrote in a March X post.

Then there are constructions like No A, no B, just C, which especially seem to crop up in AI-generated fiction. Lines such as “No bag, no things, no armor, just me” helped to fuel accusations of AI writing in the horror novel Shy Girl, which was pulled by its publisher this year. (The book’s author denied using AI to write it. Citizens Financial Group has previously said that its communications team “leverages the technology in a number of areas.” Flynn did not respond to a request for comment.)

The prevalence of this device isn’t just anecdotal—it’s measurable. (Sorry.) Barron’s reported that its appearance in corporate communications more than quadrupled from 2023 to 2025. Researchers at Pangram, which makes an AI-detection tool, estimate that Not just X but Y sentences appear three times as often in AI writing as they do in human writing. Elyas Masrour, a founding engineer at Pangram, told me that all of the major chatbots—including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and various open-source models—rely on it to varying degrees.

Many other well-known chatbot tells—such as the usage of delve—have come and gone as AI companies honed their models and worked out kinks. Last fall, ChatGPT became obsessed with goblins and gremlins, prompting another intervention: OpenAI retired ChatGPT’s “nerdy” personality, whose affinity for mythical creatures had apparently infected its other models. Yet It’s not X; it’s Y has shown no signs of abating.

Before ChatGPT came along, the construction was obscure enough that it didn’t really have an agreed-upon name. Now there’s a scramble for what to call it. Terms from academia, such as antithesis and metalinguistic negation, capture some forms of the construction but not others. In an email, Laurentia Romaniuk, a product manager for model behavior at OpenAI, referred to it as “contrastive phrasing.” Despite its clunkiness, the most popular name I’ve seen is “negative parallelism.”

When deployed judiciously, negative parallelism can be punchy. But ChatGPT turns to it too often, Romaniuk acknowledged, which can feel formulaic. So the company is working on ways to broaden the chatbot’s repertoire. In the meantime, she added, users can try giving ChatGPT “custom instructions.” On a Reddit forum about AI writing, users trade tips for scrubbing negative parallelism from chatbots’ writing. One suggested pasting Claude’s output into another AI chatbot and telling it to act as a copy editor who has a strict ban on “negative pairings” such as “it wasn’t X, it was Y.”

One obstacle to a more comprehensive fix is that no one seems to know for certain why AI models are so enamored with negative parallelism in the first place—maybe not even the companies that created them. (Anthropic and Google did not respond to my requests for an interview.)

The simplest theory is that humans trained them that way. Large language models are built by first identifying patterns in unfathomable quantities of human-written text: books, academic papers, patent filings, and especially the internet. Negative parallelism was, of course, present in the initial training data. Shakespeare aside, there are lots of famous examples: In the 1960s, the legendary football coach Vince Lombardi popularized the saying that “winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.” In the 1990s, a frozen-pizza brand’s commercials insisted: “It’s not delivery. It’s DiGiorno.”

But the training data also included lots of bad writing that AI companies don’t want their chatbots to mimic, Tuhin Chakrabarty, a computer-science professor at Stony Brook University who studies AI writing, told me. So they also undergo “reinforcement learning,” a process by which human reviewers grade the models on their responses. Through trial and error, chatbots are guided away from inappropriate responses (making stuff up, giving illegal advice, insulting the user) and toward those rated helpful. Chakrabarty said that it’s plausible that human reviewers tended to give high marks to responses that included It’s not X; it’s Y. That could be because negative parallelism gives the impression of nuance and insight: The AI seems to be reasoning its way from a subpar descriptor to a more apt one.

That still may not be enough to explain just how prevalent the construction seems to be across the major AI models. Several experts I talked with pointed me to another, even weirder explanation.

Although chatbots have advanced dramatically in their research and reasoning capacities, they are still fundamentally text-prediction machines. They generate answers one “token”—or chunk of text—at a time, based on what has come before. Each successive word choice factors in both the statistical likelihood of that word coming next in a sequence, based on patterns in the original training data, and the likelihood that it will lead to a highly rated response overall. In other words, the models are always seeking a balance between the clever word choice and the obvious one.

When a chatbot uses negative parallelism, according to this theory, it’s essentially hedging between the two. Once it has started a sentence whose function is to characterize something, the path of least resistance is to say first what the thing isn’t (X), and only then what the thing is (Y). Put another way: For a sentence that begins with “This is,” following it with “not just” is both more likely and safer than the many options for how to directly characterize its subject. And after “This is not just,” the rest of the sentence gets easier too. The next word can be X—the boring, obvious descriptor that gets negated—which in turn sets up the final choice of Y, the somewhat punchier descriptor.

Even if researchers could figure out exactly why chatbots embrace negative parallelism, there’s another factor that could make it very hard to fix: “When something gets into these models, it’s very hard to pull it out,” Masrour, the Pangram engineer, said. That’s because one of the main ways that AI models have continued to evolve is by training on text generated by other bots. That AI text is presumably replete with negative parallelism, which further bakes it into the newer model. Now consider that a growing share of the writing on the internet is also AI-generated. This, too, becomes training data for future generations of AI.

On top of that, some AI labs are also using AI instead of, or in addition to, human reviewers in the post-training process, Chakrabarty said. Without intervention, there’s a risk of “model collapse,” in which AI reinforces its own biases to the extent that it loses touch with the human data that were meant to ground it. “It’s a very vicious loop,” Chakrabarty said. “There’s already negative parallelism in the text, and then AI is preferencing negative parallelism—it comes to a point where it just cannot write without that.” AI language is eating its own tail.

Chatbot clichés might be grating, but there’s an upside to them: They make AI writing easier to distinguish from the human variety. Masrour said that although the AI writing’s specific markers keep changing, it isn’t actually getting any more difficult for Pangram’s software to detect. The stubborn persistence of constructions such as negative parallelism may be one reason.

The trade-off, for human writers, is that a once-potent rhetorical device is now a cliché that makes you sound like a bot. That has put some people in the awkward position of insisting that they’re not using AI—that’s just how they write. Before you mock them for it, consider that you too might soon find yourself talking and writing more like a machine: A recent study by researchers in Germany suggested that AI’s writing tics are now cropping up more in spontaneous human conversation. If that continues, maybe negative parallelism will eventually lose its status as an AI-writing tell after all. The fault, dear readers, will be not in our chatbots, but in ourselves.

Jamir Nazir has become the face of the AI-writing crisis. In May, the largely unknown 62-year-old Trinidadian writer was named a regional winner of the prestigious Commonwealth Prize for his short story “The Serpent in the Grove.” But after it was published in the literary magazine Granta, signs began to emerge that the story—about a cocoa farmer who cheated on his wife and then tried to kill her—may have been AI-generated. Among other indicators, Pangram, an imperfect but industry-leading AI-detection tool, flagged the story’s text as 100 percent artificial.

Inscrutable lines plucked from Nazir’s dense prose were mocked and memed. A young woman in the story “had the kind of walking that made benches become men.” Another “smiled like sunrise over a sink.” Soon, other winners’ stories came under suspicion. The Commonwealth Foundation defended the authors, saying that all had testified that their work was original, but it pledged to investigate further.

On Tuesday, the Commonwealth Foundation announced that “The Serpent in the Grove” had been chosen from among the regional winners as this year’s overall prize winner. “The team worked hard to understand Jamir’s creative process and learn how he shaped his story over time,” a spokesperson for the Commonwealth Foundation told me in an email. Razmi Farook, the organization’s director general, had previously issued a statement on the results of its probe: “After a thorough consultation with our judges and careful consideration of all available information, we are satisfied that AI was not used to write the winning stories.” She noted that the investigation did not make use of Pangram or other AI-detection tools, because of their inability to provide conclusive evidence as well as “concerns regarding artistic ownership and consent.” Instead, the foundation said that it had held “detailed discussions” about the regional winners’ creative process and examined “working drafts, time-stamped documents and notes” that showed how they developed their stories.

In a phone interview on Tuesday afternoon, Nazir told me that he feels vindicated—and relieved. “Look, I didn’t use it!” he said about AI. Now that he has won the prize, Nazir said, he is free at last to explain his process and clear his name.

We talked for more than an hour about his writing process, his health (he referenced complications with both diabetes and cancer), and his views on technology. On several occasions, he seemed to avoid answering my questions directly; when he did, some of the answers were circuitous. I was surprised to hear him opine that AI-generated writing will soon be widely accepted in literature, even as he maintained that he didn’t use AI tools in creating his story. He seemed bullish on AI overall, viewing it as a revolutionary technology, though he worried about the repercussions of saying so. Although he couldn’t name any works by Derek Walcott, a writer he cited as one of his main literary inspirations, he said that he had prepared a collection of short stories in Walcott’s style, which he hopes to publish soon.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Will Oremus: How did it feel to win this award after all of the controversy you’ve endured since you were named a finalist?

Jamir Nazir: Yes, there’s been a lot of controversy preceding this win, and it’s been really hard. To hear people smearing me, and reading all of the crap. They didn’t know there was a real human and a real family behind the story.

One of my most joyful moments in receiving the news that I won the award was sharing it with my mother, who will be 82 in August. My nephews have kept her informed on lots of the negative things. I didn’t take a sword and plunge it into her side, but I felt as though I supplied the sword by entering the competition. So it made me feel so good when I could tell her that I had won despite all the nonsense that they were seeing.

Oremus: I know you’ve said you didn’t use AI while writing this story. But I’m interested to hear more about your writing process. People were curious how you produced this work that was so dense that it almost reads more like poetry than prose.

Nazir: I was born with diabetes. And as a result of that, conventional typing on a keyboard—it’s extremely difficult for me. As I’ve gotten older, the neuropathy has gotten worse. Sitting for long periods of time at a desk gives me some back problems. So what happened is I decided: Look—no better place to write than the couch. And as a result of that, I found out that I can use the speech-to-text function of the Google keyboard on my Android phone …That’s what’s actually producing words, and then I edit them and so on.

That has given me the opportunity to significantly polish text. Because you know, on an Android phone, when the keyboard comes up, you only have a very small space, about three and a half inches, to see the writing. So I would look at those lines, and hold those words in my mind, and keep reviewing them, keep polishing.

But to back up a bit: Why the hell—sorry for the expression—would I need AI? It was absolutely not needed in this story, because I lived this. The story actually has a lot of real people, real places, and real situations. Even the little bread shop I wrote about in the story actually exists—not in my small, little village here now, but where my wife came from, which is another small village.

Oremus: You’ve explained why you think the AI-writing detectors might have mistakenly flagged your story. How did you convince the Commonwealth committee that you didn’t use AI after all?

Nazir: They requested a lot of documentation. They made it clear it was voluntary to produce these materials, because they were not part of the initial rules. But I had to produce all of the previous drafts, and also my character profiles I had sketched out. And of course, I originally had to sign saying that no AI was used.

Oremus: You’ve talked about how the unusual writing style in “The Serpent in the Grove” stemmed from your love of poetry. Who are a couple of your favorite poets who have inspired you?

Nazir: The first one whose poetry I fell in love with was a guy known as Pablo Neruda from Chile. And his teacher or mentor was a lady known as Gabriela Mistral. Both of them had a profound impact on me. Then there is Derek Walcott, a Caribbean poet who, like Pablo Neruda, is a Nobel Prize winner. The thing that got me attracted to Walcott was his complete disregard for the traditional Western sentence structure, which people cite as one of the things that proves my writing was AI. But Walcott created his own style.

I looked at how they all write, and I write poetry in their style too. AI must have been fed all their work. And another thing to that: I have significant poems that I’ve posted in several poetry groups on Facebook. Once it’s on Facebook, AI companies will have data-mined that, right? So they have all of that as a reflection of my style as well, right? I wonder if they can attempt to claim it as their own, as AI-generated. Do you think that’s possible?

Oremus: So you mean that AI gets trained on human writing, and then it generates similar writing?

Nazir: Okay, say AI has been trained with the writing of Will. So it understands what Will does, right? Now, when it sees Will’s writing again—if somebody puts Will’s article through an AI detector—because it’s familiar with that style and construct, it tells itself, This must be generated by an AI system. I’m wondering if it is possible.

Oremus: I don’t know. That’s not how a tool like Pangram works. It’s looking for statistical patterns in the language that are more commonly produced by AI systems than by human writers.

Nazir: But is that true? Why, then, has no court of law in any country, even the tiniest country in the world, accepted as admissible any AI-detector system? Not one country. So that shows you, in terms of the reliability—I’m not saying it’s not helpful, but I think there’s still a lot of refining.

Oremus: You had mentioned some of your inspirations earlier, including Walcott and Neruda. What’s your favorite Walcott work?

Nazir: Walcott has a lot of Caribbean poems, right? And I cannot—there are several, and they talk about the destruction of a village because of the sea. And I wrote something like that. It’s quite a change. And I am advertising a little bit, but I have a collection that I have written, my Caribbean collection, sort of Walcott-style. I tried to edit it as much myself as I could, and it’s ready for publication. So hopefully this award will give me the platform to publish this.

Oremus: But do you have a favorite of Walcott’s poems?

Nazir: A story of Walcott’s?

Oremus: Yeah.

Nazir: To be honest with you, I can’t think of a specific favorite right now. I am getting a little bit of brain fog in recall. I had an excellent memory, and now it haunts me because at times I can’t remember even basic stuff. I think it’s a part of the condition, the illness. And I’m on chemotherapy as well. So that is a hard thing.

Oremus: Some of your posts on LinkedIn, as people have pointed out, are a very different style from your fiction. Which, of course, makes sense, right? I mean, fiction is a completely different mode of writing. But I wondered if maybe you used AI on the LinkedIn posts.

Nazir: No, no, no. I did research with AI. But in terms of the actual writing—I had grown accustomed to very technical and precise writing. I think that AI is a good tool for research— that’s the most value.

And on the same topic of that, what about the typewriter? When the typewriter was first invented, writers kicked hell and said, The thing is writing. You’re supposed to use a quill or your fountain pen. And there was a big hullabaloo. We passed that, and then next came new word processors. I can tell you word processors are machine assistants, because they can check the spelling, right? They can search, find and replace, suggest synonyms, et cetera. Modern-day word processing can do almost everything. Where’s the uproar? It settled down. Now I think the same thing will happen with AI.

Oremus: Because you think that eventually AI will be accepted as just another tool for writers the way that a word processor is, what is so bad about using it? Why not use it?

Nazir: No, I’m not saying it’s bad. But because of this current time, where the debate is on, like it was on for the typewriter or the word processor, I wouldn’t encourage any writers in any kind of literary competition to utilize it now for fear of people criticizing them. Look—I didn’t use it! It’s not only me, Will. It’s also all these people who are painted with this AI brush, right? So I imagine you should stay away from it for any literary competition for the next two or three years. I think that discussions will be held and so on, and then people will get an opportunity to vent.

I don’t know if I’m walking on dangerous ground here with you, because as I was told a lot by the wife and other people, Do not show any appreciation for AI. I see it as being a tool incorporated in the future. Because a lot of people use it—a lot of people.

Yesterday, Freddy woke up in a hotel room in downtown Boston that had been paid for by the celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay. Draped over one chair was an autographed chef’s coat and a personal note from the Hell’s Kitchen star: “Dear Freddy, Welcome to Boston!” For the past month, the German man who went by @FreddyLA7 on X was on the ride of his life. Crisscrossing the United States on an epic World Cup road trip, the pseudonymous soccer fan posted about the beauty of big-box chain stores and gas stations, projecting an infectious enthusiasm for American mass culture. Along the way, he racked up hundreds of thousands of followers; met famous singers, wrestlers, and astronauts; and was showered with swag and free hotel stays.

Then, within a span of 24 hours, Freddy’s American fever dream ended as abruptly as it began. On Monday night, he watched his home country fall to Paraguay in a stunning upset. “Oh no Freddy …,” lamented JJ Watt, the former NFL star who had gifted him and his traveling companions a luxe hotel stay in Houston last month. Not everyone was as sympathetic. “Now that Germany is out, we can all admit Freddy is a fake account, right?” one user posted. Others suggested—either seriously or in jest—that Freddy was a CIA operative: “Back to Langley I’m afraid.” Last night, he deactivated his X account.

No one has produced compelling evidence that Freddy was anything other than what he claimed. Yet something about him always seemed too good to be true. Behind the everymensch image was a skilled poster who knew which cultural signifiers would strike a chord with Americans. Behind each seemingly off-the-cuff post (“DUDE LMAO THIS IS A GAS STATION😭😭😭”) were careful choices about how to compose the shot for maximum virality. Atlanta, he observed, was “so green it’s crazy. It feels like you’re in a forest the whole time.” A Taco Bell, where he sampled an electric-blue soda and nacho cheese, was “the Holy land.” His starry-eyed enthusiasm held an obvious appeal: Here was a foreigner showing us with fresh eyes what’s still to love about a country racked with anxiety that it’s in decline.

Many of the other accounts that capitalized on the “overly enthusiastic World Cup tourist” trend were quickly revealed to be less than genuine. But Freddy, who didn’t respond to several requests for comment, never quite fit the mold of the crypto-shilling influencer. He remained stubbornly anonymous and claimed to have no interest in monetizing his social-media success. Though he seemed to post casually and freely—capturing his meal at a Chili’s in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and the view from his front-row seats to TNA Wrestling’s Slammiversary—he omitted any details that would reveal his identity. He covered his face with an image of his favorite soccer player, the Portuguese star Cristiano Ronaldo.

Eschewing fame and fortune, however, turned out not to spare Freddy from the same scrutiny that awaits any other viral sensation. As the novelty of his appeal faded, it gave way to a backlash; tearing Freddy down became more interesting than building him up. While Freddy was in Boston mourning Germany’s defeat, online sleuths excavated the least-savory tidbits from his X posting history. They unearthed a 2023 post in which Freddy had alluded to attending “some concerts in the USA,” indicating that the World Cup trip was not his first visit to the country. The discovery, meant to stoke doubts about the authenticity of Freddy’s wonderment at basic aspects of American life, soon led to a more damaging one. Freddy had defended a livestreamer who used a racial slur when singing along to rap lyrics. After deleting his X account last night, Freddy posted an explanation of sorts on Instagram. He said that things had turned “too toxic,” and that people were digging through his past posts to “make me look like a bad person.” He claimed that ultimately removing the account had been “the plan all along.”

It’s possible that Freddy really was just an ordinary guy. That could explain why none of the many officials and celebrities who met with him saw fit to unmask him. Spokespeople for the mayor of Houston and the Houston Police Department confirmed that Freddy was a real person, but declined to offer any more information about him. Representatives for Ramsay, Watt, and the country-music star Ella Langley—all of whom apparently interacted with Freddy—did not respond to requests for comment. An email to the astronaut Jessica Meir, who FaceTimed with Freddy from the International Space Station, returned an auto-response: “Please resend after I’m back on planet Earth!”

He does at least seem to have been from Germany. In late June, Freddy told the German newspaper Hamburger Abendblatt that he’s a student in his 20s from Hamburg’s Bergedorf district who is majoring in media management. He asked the publication to keep his name private so that he and his friends could continue their trip without being mobbed. Freddy’s pre-viral social-media history appears more or less consistent with that backstory. He posted on X mostly in English but sometimes in German, occasionally commented on German politics, and in 2024 posted excitedly about a big soccer match in “my hometown Hamburg.” At least twice, he posted receipts that blacked out his last name but revealed the first name Frederik. I did find a LinkedIn profile that matched the broad contours of what we know about him, but the profile’s owner did not respond to a message. Nor did the CEO of a German sports-marketing firm where he had interned.

Freddy’s anonymity fueled his success. A real person has a profession, a past, and politics. “Freddy from Germany” was less a person than a persona. One of Freddy’s savviest decisions may have been to quietly turn down an invitation to the White House. He told the German newspaper that he would have liked to accept but didn’t want to get involved in politics. Another internet-famous World Cup fan, Shaun from Scotland, got blowback from liberals for posing with Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis.

Staying faceless made Freddy a mirror. Conservatives saw a reflection of American greatness. Liberals detected a sly continental wink at American excess. Optimists saw hope in a figure who had managed to unite the country in something other than outrage. Cynics saw an opportunist pandering to the gullible masses. Conspiracy theorists, of course, saw a CIA psyop.

Whether or not Freddy deserved to be hounded off the internet didn’t really matter. By the time he had been Milkshake Ducked he had become polarizing in the way that everything popular on social media eventually must. Divisiveness doesn’t have to be fatal; for canny influencers, it can be a path to even greater success. But the way for Freddy to prove his sincerity would have been to reveal his identity, and that would have made him real-world famous in just the way he apparently was trying to avoid. The rarest thing about him was his decision to forgo all that and return to the road with his friends.

Fittingly, the day before Freddy disappeared, another German World Cup fan began to go viral on X. “America, I am inside you! 🇺🇸🏆,” posted Finn Agostinelli, a.k.a. Fiago. By yesterday morning, he was already gleefully cribbing from the Freddy playbook. “What is this sauce?” Agostinelli captioned a photo of himself holding a bottle of A1. “Never seen that one before is it like HP or Worcester Sauce?” Unlike with Freddy, there’s no mystery over his identity—or his motivations. A soccer influencer with a popular YouTube channel, Agostinelli posted today that he’s putting his sports analysis on hold until the German club season starts: “Until then I’m a full-time travel creator exploring the United States.”