A couple of things I learned from “How to Tell When a Robot Has Written You a Letter,” a Medium piece by the reliably excellent Clive Thompson: 1) Companies remain which employ people to handwrite letters for you, and 2) Subtle differences make it possible to detect if a machine has written a missive rather than a human (though I must admit I would still be fooled even after reading Thompson’s post). An excerpt:

“So now robots are trying to write like us. But they’re not perfect yet! It turns out there are some intriguing quirks of human psychology and letter-formation that the machines can’t yet mimic. Learn those tricks, and you can spot the robots.

I first heard of these human-machine handwriting differences in a conversation last week with Brian Curliss and Daniel Jurek, the cofounders of the startup Maillift. If you need to send out 200 personalized letters to sales leads but haven’t got the time to handwrite them yourself — or if your handwriting is, like mine, grotesque — then Maillift will generate them for you, using teams of genuinely carbon-based people. (What sort of person enjoys handwriting letters for others? ‘Teachers,’ Curliss replies. Apparently teachers have spectacular handwriting, take enormous pride in the craft, and want to make some extra coin in their evenings and weekends.)

Curliss and Jurek also own a handwriting robot, so they’ve studied thousands of human-written letters and compared them to ones produced by machines. They’ve identified three crucial distinctions.”