When the Human Tries to Please the Algorithm

There is a shift that becomes harder to ignore the more you look at it. People are no longer simply creating things for other people. Increasingly, they are creating things for systems that decide whether other people will ever see them at all. The audience is still technically human, but the first layer of judgment is no longer human in any real sense. It is already a filter, a ranking system, or an AI deciding what deserves attention and what doesn’t.

The System in the Middle

This is especially obvious in something as simple and personal as a resume. People write them with one goal in mind: to get through a system that will screen, rank, and discard them before any human ever reads a single line. In more and more cases, that system is itself AI-driven. So the loop becomes almost absurd: AI helps write the resume, and AI decides whether the resume is “good enough” to even reach a person. The human is still in the center of it, but only as material being translated into something legible for the machine.

The problem is not efficiency. Efficiency is just the surface story. The real shift is deeper: the logic of the system starts rewriting the content itself. If you know that a machine will judge your text first, you stop writing to express experience and start writing to trigger recognition. You begin selecting words not because they are true, but because they are safe. Not because they reflect what you did, but because they survive the filter. And slowly, without noticing, the idea of what a “good” resume even is gets replaced. It stops being a reflection of a person and becomes a shape that passes screening.

Beyond Hiring: The Pattern Spreads

The same pattern spreads far beyond hiring. On YouTube, people are not really making videos for viewers anymore — they are making them for a recommendation system that decides whether viewers will ever see them. In writing, people are not just writing for readers — they are writing for search systems that decide whether the text even appears. Across almost every platform, the first audience is no longer human. It is the system that sits in between.

And that creates a very specific kind of pressure. Not a direct one where someone tells you what to do, but something quieter and more invasive: you learn what works. What gets shown. What gets buried. What disappears completely. And because visibility is the only thing that matters in these systems, people start adapting to them instinctively. At first it is small adjustments. Then structure. Then tone. Then rhythm. Until eventually, the output is no longer expression at all, but optimization disguised as expression.

This is where the real distortion shows up. In the race for productivity, performance, and “better results,” people stop doing things in the way they would naturally do them. They stop writing, speaking, and creating from their own internal logic. Instead, they produce versions of themselves that are more likely to pass through a system. The goal quietly shifts from expression to approval. From communication to survival inside a filter.

And the more you optimize for it, the more you depend on it. Until at some point you are no longer simply using a system to reach people. You are reshaping yourself so the system will allow you to reach people at all.

The Erosion of Expression

This is not just a technical change. It is a cultural one, and it is already deep. It quietly rewires what “good work” means. Not what is honest or clear or meaningful, but what performs. What passes. What survives distribution. What survives being reduced into something a machine can understand quickly enough to rank it.

And slowly, almost without noticing, people stop asking a simple question: “Is this how I would say it?”

Instead, they start asking something colder: “Will this work?”

And that is where something genuinely human starts to erode. Not in one moment, and not in a dramatic collapse, but through a long chain of small compromises that feel rational each time they happen. You optimize for reach, for visibility, for performance — and in doing so you drift away from the way you would have spoken, written, or created before there was a system standing in the middle.

In the end, the most uncomfortable part is not that algorithms exist. It is that people start rebuilding themselves around them. And once that happens, it becomes harder to tell whether we are still expressing ideas — or just learning how to pass through systems that decide which ideas are allowed to exist in the first place.

— Serhii Nadolskyi