The Erased Signal

The Signal That Used to Show

For a long time, there was a real, earned signal that showed up on the page for anyone who'd actually lived somewhere in a language that wasn't originally theirs: studied abroad in the US, the UK, Australia, wherever, worked for years in a second language, immigrated and rebuilt a career in a new one. Not the fact of it, listed as a line on a resume. The way they wrote. Certain phrasing, certain structure, certain vocabulary that you only pick up by actually being there, not by reading about it.

I know this one firsthand. I did my MBA at Babson College, outside Boston, and for years afterward it showed in how I wrote, not just in the line that said where I'd studied. That gap, between someone who'd actually lived it and someone who hadn't, was real and earned. I'm not saying this to make a point about myself. I'm saying it because that gap doesn't exist on paper anymore, for anyone, and understanding why matters more than my particular version of it.

What AI Erased

Today, anyone can open an AI tool, paste in rough notes, and get back flawless English in ten seconds. Sharp phrasing, correct grammar, confident structure, the specific words and cadences that used to take years to earn. It doesn't matter if you've never left your hometown. The tool doesn't know the difference, and neither, at a glance, does the page.

None of this makes anyone's actual experience smaller. The people who lived it still lived it, still carry whatever that time gave them. What shrank is what shows up on the page. The signal that used to announce itself, you can tell this person spent real time somewhere, immersed in something, doesn't announce anything anymore, because everyone's English now reads the same: correct, confident, and polished.

That's the part I want to be precise about, because it's easy to get this wrong. It's not that experience stopped mattering. It's that unless the person reading a resume already knows to go looking for it, unless they're specifically asking "did this person actually do the thing they're claiming," it's invisible. It used to be visible by default. Now it only shows up if someone goes looking. And nobody scanning two hundred resumes in a morning is going looking.

The same thing happened to the words, not just the grammar. Ten years ago a stiff, over-formal, buzzword-heavy resume at least told you something: this person doesn't write naturally, or they're trying too hard. Now nearly every resume reaches for the same handful of words. Visionary. Results-driven. Passionate about impact. Not because a thousand people all happened to think alike. Because the tool that wrote their resume for them reaches for the same statistically safe words every time, for everyone.

Put those two things together, the polish and the phrasing, and you get a page that has never looked more finished and told you less. Everyone's English is flawless now. Everyone's a visionary now. The floor rose for everyone at once, which sounds like progress, until you realize what a floor rising for everyone does. It doesn't lift anyone. It flattens the whole field into one indistinguishable plain.

None of this means AI writing is undetectable. A sharp reader, or a good filter, can often catch the tells, the same handful of buzzwords, a rhythm that's a little too even, phrasing that sounds polished and says nothing. But being catchable in general doesn't help the specific person this chapter is about. Their English isn't a tell to be caught. It's the real thing, and at a glance, on a page, it now reads exactly like everyone else's, tell-free version included.

Somewhere in that flattened field is someone who genuinely earned it, the years abroad, the second language, the immersion nobody can fake. On paper, in 2026, you'd never know which one they are. Not because it isn't true. Because the page no longer knows how to tell you.