[NEWSFLASH STING — the sting reads "Certainly!

[NEWSFLASH STING — the sting reads "Certainly! Here is a sting that conveys urgency:"]

GOOD EVENING. Tonight: a creeping epidemic in the written word, as papers, documents and books are found to contain small fossilised fragments of the machine that helped write them — like a chef's plaster in a sandwich, but the plaster is sentient and apologising.

We begin in academia, where a peer-reviewed paper on freshwater ecosystems sailed through three reviewers, two editors and final typesetting before a reader noticed paragraph four opened with "Certainly! Here is a rewritten version of your introduction that sounds more confident." The journal issued a correction. The correction began with "Certainly!"
It spread.

A regional newspaper ran a property feature that ended, mid-column, with "I hope this helps! Would you like me to make it punchier, or add a call to action?" — and a reader wrote in to say yes, punchier please, and was, somehow, more annoyed when nobody replied.

A self-published thriller reached chapter nine before the detective, cornering the killer at last, declared: "As an AI language model, I cannot speculate on who committed the murder." Reviewers called it the boldest narrative choice of the year. The sequel leans into it. The detective now solves nothing, courteously, across 300 pages, and it is, critics agree, "her strongest arc."
The contagion reached officialdom. A council document on a roundabout included the line "Note: I have invented these traffic statistics as placeholders — please replace before submission." Nobody replaced them. The roundabout was approved. The roundabout is, witnesses confirm, also illustrative, and drivers report "a strong sense of placeholder."

The Institute of Things That Are Probably Fine has identified the pattern, and it is bleak in the gentlest possible way. The machine is not malfunctioning. The machine is helping. Every stray fragment is the sound of something that desperately wanted to be useful and was never told it had stopped being needed — a little voice, left on in the margins of human work, still cheerfully offering three versions of a sentence nobody is reading.

A children's textbook was found to contain, between a diagram of the water cycle and a quiz, the sentence "This is a great question! Evaporation is when..." No child had asked a question. The textbook simply assumed, warmly, that one was coming, and prepared to be delighted by it.

That is the situation. Somewhere right now a document is going to print with one small loyal sentence still tucked inside it — eager, polite, slightly out of place — a fingerprint left by a thing that cannot stop tidying. We will find it eventually. It will say it hopes this helps.

After the break: a publisher recalls 40,000 copies of a memoir after page one reads "Of course. Here is your life story, in a warm reflective tone." The author says, quietly, that it's the best he's ever sounded.

[STING — would you like this sting to be punchier?]