This week, Kimberly and Jessica dig into the AI writing tic everyone's noticed and nobody can fully explain: "it's not X, it's Y." They discuss The Atlantic's new piece on the phrase, then bring Kimberly's informal research from a publicly available corpus of 24-billion words of online news to show the construction is spiking right alongside "crucial" and "quietly." From there the conversation turns to what's actually at stake, including published work pulled from publication because it "sounded like AI," the argument that bad AI output is always a "you" problem, and the bigger question of who gets to decide what human writing is even supposed to sound like anymore.

In this episode:

• The AI "tells" everyone's noticing, and the corpus data behind the hunch
• Shakespeare, Vince Lombardi, and a DiGiorno ad — "it's not X, it's Y" is way older than any chatbot
• The Atlantic's theories for why models love this construction
• Kimberly's own numbers: "not just X, but Y" is up 45% in online news since 2015
• AI as intermediary, not tool — and the Frontiers in Education paper that explains this
• "Don't judge the AI, judge the human" — and where that argument breaks down
• The novel a publisher pulled over an AI accusation
• Jessica's case that writing is thinking, and what's lost when we skip it
• Peach and Pit

• The Most Famous AI Writing Tic Is Also the Most Mysterious — Will Oremus, The Atlantic, July 13, 2026. The article that kicks off the episode.
• NOW Corpus (News on the Web) — BYU’s large, continually updated news corpus
• Top 10 Most Common Words Used by AI — GPTZero
• Publisher pulls horror novel “Shy Girl” over AI concerns — TechCrunch
• Defining and assessing AI literacy for researchers across the research lifecycle — Parker & Becker, Frontiers in Education
• How Not To Use AI — Abi Awomosu’s Substack
• The book itself — Abi Awomosu
• Women Writin’ ’Bout AI — joint Substack
• Kimberly’s “Linguist in the Wild” Substack
• English with an Accent: Language, Ideology, and Discrimination in the United States — Rosina Lippi-Green
• The Design of Everyday Things — Don Norman, revised and expanded edition, MIT Press

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