Harvard student creates Chrome extension to humanise artificial intelligence text

A Harvard student has developed a provocative Chrome extension that functions as the antithesis of traditional productivity tools, perhaps signalling a new direction for workplace communication.

The service, named Sincerely, takes polished AI-generated text and deliberately introduces flaws to ensure it appears as though it were written by a human hand.

Created by Ben Horwitz using Anthropic’s Claude AI, the project was born out of a personal frustration with the growing volume of "AI slop" cluttering digital inboxes.

"I was so sick of AI slop in my own inbox," Horwitz remarked during an appearance on the TBPN podcast. "People would email me; it all looks the exact same."

The extension offers three distinct settings to mask synthetic origins. The "Subtle" mode removes superfluous words and adds intentional errors, while "Human" mode shifts the tone to a conversational style.

Perhaps most notable is the "CEO mode", which converts messages into concise, lowercase text and appends the signature "sent from my iPhone" to mimic a busy executive.

Horwitz views the tool more as a piece of social commentary than a commercial venture, noting that the loop of prompting, generating, and then "humanising" reflects a strange new communication arms race.

"Humans using AI to make AI more human," Horwitz observed, highlighting the irony of current practices in which users copy-paste prompts into 'Sincerely' to hide their initial use of technology.

While the extension is free for initial uses, further access requires a $4.99 fee. Horwitz remains a student as they explore the intersection of social dynamics and emerging technologies.