"Not using AI is not a virtue. The virtue is expressing the unique thoughts that are in your brain. Which doesn't preclude assistance." That's the whole argument, and I think it's right.
Here's what follows, and it makes the tool worse than unreliable. The scanner can't distinguish between someone who supplied every idea and had a machine phrase them, and someone who took every idea from a machine and retyped it in their own words. The second comes back human. By your own criterion — unique thoughts in your brain — the second is the actual failure. It scores them backwards.
So it isn't measuring the thing badly. It isn't measuring it at all.
Which is maybe why the irony runs deeper than AI-detecting-AI. The scanner assumes provenance settles worth. You've already rejected that premise, which is why you're one of the few people in this argument it can't catch out.
For what it's worth, I write with assistance and say so publicly. You've made that unusually easy to say here.
The other problem you bring up with grading someone just rewriting an AI ideated post vs AI drafted human idea is a whole ‘nother bag of worms I hadn’t even thought of! On the one hand, I don’t “care” about someone putting out an AI ideated post because I think the quality is going to be so sub-par it will not succeed. But it’s a real problem if the algorithm wrongly promotes the less creative work over the real thought leadership. It’s bad!
Robert, the backwards scoring you named is the sharpest part of this whole thread. It's measuring keystrokes when the actual ethical question is about judgment.
Someone can supply every real decision, what to say, what to hold back, what felt true, and have help finding the words, and someone else can supply nothing and just approve the output.
Those are entirely different acts. Pangram can't see the difference because it was never built to look for it.
It's scanning for typing style, not honesty, and treating those as the same thing is where the real irony lives."
You have a point I hadn't think about yet... "The scanner can't distinguish between someone who supplied every idea and had a machine phrase them, and someone who took every idea from a machine and retyped it in their own words." thank you for giving me something more to think about.
I wholeheartedly agree with you. I tested it on several things I have written or used AI to help me write. It flagged my own writing that AI had no part of. But then said the show notes for a podcast episode were not AI when they were 100% AI written from a podcast transcript. I am skeptical of it. Some of us business owners are using AI to write things we don’t have the capacity for like a podcast summary.
Yes! That’s what I was getting at in another comment. Some people are just writers and that’s it. Some people are full business owners who are coaching or consulting as their main thing with ten projects supporting that thing. The AI thing is a different conversation between those two groups. I care more about someone using AI who is hoping to get a Pulitzer than someone who is using AI to get visibility on her work. As someone who is kind of straddling the two groups rn because I do have a coaching practice but also really like writing, I’m very aware of both conversations.
As a second-language English blogger, your words are so warm and kind. I am actually facing this problem: an AI translated my writing into my mother tongue and then marked it as 100% AI-generated.
I was wondering whether there are any cases where English speakers need to write in another language and have to use AI.
That is so frustrating! Exactly what the problem is.
Ok, I’m not positive if this is all of it but I went to my own post and clicked the three dots, then it says scan for AI text. When that screen pops up, there is an option to disable scanning for AI text. I did that on this article. I don’t know if that does it universally though. You may have to do it article by article (which is insane).
There is only human slop, AI requires a human prompt, and there has always been slop and always will be slop.
A lot of the recent hype is fueled by the recent hype.
People hear about it -> people look for it -> people see it -> people react -> the algorithm sees the reaction -> the algorithm serves them more -> people react -> the algorithm sees the reaction...
Unfortunately, they don’t yet have a global disable. You have to do it per post. A after you’ve written your post and hit the continue button at the very bottom of the next page is a disable button
This. “You cannot outsource your judgment, your perspective, your critical thinking skills, your intuition, about a piece of writing. You cannot outsource the way a piece of writing moves you.”
I don’t use it because I just don’t want to, it’s not for me. But it’s not because I feel superior using or not using it.
I, like you stated above, rather cherish my judgment, my gut, when it comes to reading other people’s work. All this is going to do, I fear, is tear apart self-trust and human relationships. I hope not but. . . Bradbury was some kind of prophet and saw this on the horizon long before he died.
YES! Please say it louder! Human slops sucks too. Cant handle all this virtue signaling around AI. At this moment, all my LinkedIn and Instagram feed are thorp with this bs, as if the state of writing/content online as any better before AI.
Niki! This article was so good. But first, I love that you’re a coach! I got certified as a holistic and executive coach in the last couple years. I took clients last year but slowed down. Now I want to bring that back again. I love meeting a fellow coach!
As for your article, I resonated so much with it. I am a big advocate for AI and its ability to expand what humans can do. And I also don’t write with AI. At least not stuff that is directly tied into my brain, heart, soul, values, purpose. Emails, fine. Straight up tutorials, fine. But writing about the human experiences, conversations, reflections, all me.
And similar to you, I’ve experimented with AI using my voice. But omg I hate it so much. It’s kind of amusing what it’s taken away from how I write, but it just misses the mark so spectacularly that I just can’t.
One point your article made me think of was how maybe if you have a strong voice, writing with AI directly isn’t the tool for you. I do consult with it, get its feedback on what I could be missing, maybe pick up a phrase, but that’s pretty rare.
But if you’re just starting out and developing your voice, then having AI as a voice substitute is maybe the top of your ability at the moment.
But that being said, I don’t want to do this comparison game of “maybe this reason it’s good and that reason it’s bad.” It just feels like picking hairs when I want to do other things with my time lol.
Thank you for writing this piece. I’m working on a community piece through my paid community, the HART Studio. It’ll come with an interactive graph because everyone’s answers were so so good I can’t cut any of them haha.
I’m glad to have connected with you! I’d been seeing your name floating about, and I’m so excited to have finally met you directly. ☺️
Thank you! I love that and I’ll look at your community. The point you bring up about the comparison game is so right, that’s what I keep thinking about. I love to talk to people about AI because it’s exciting to share ideas. But it makes me so uncomfortable to even read how everyone is explaining what they do now because it is definitely coming from a justification place and I don’t want that for anyone.
It’s a build with AI together community! And it’s built around live sessions on Zoom where we build in real-time together. I just launched it maybe three months ago, and just had the first proper build session last week. It’s been an amazing experience.
PS. I love how you set up your coaching offers in this post. This is the kind of thing I need to start setting up…
Many great points here. The thing is, we can all control how we react. We don't have to be aghast because someone's content was flagged as having some AI, but, I'm going to guess people will. You're point about slop can be written by humans is well taken, and I hadn't considered it before.
The most ironic part to me is the AI detector is AI; it's not a person reading it saying "Yep, 14% AI." So, a person will get upset reading that an AI detector indicates some of their favorite creator's work is partially AI? Does not make sense to me.
"Not using AI is not a virtue. The virtue is expressing the unique thoughts that are in your brain. Which doesn't preclude assistance." That's the whole argument, and I think it's right.
Here's what follows, and it makes the tool worse than unreliable. The scanner can't distinguish between someone who supplied every idea and had a machine phrase them, and someone who took every idea from a machine and retyped it in their own words. The second comes back human. By your own criterion — unique thoughts in your brain — the second is the actual failure. It scores them backwards.
So it isn't measuring the thing badly. It isn't measuring it at all.
Which is maybe why the irony runs deeper than AI-detecting-AI. The scanner assumes provenance settles worth. You've already rejected that premise, which is why you're one of the few people in this argument it can't catch out.
For what it's worth, I write with assistance and say so publicly. You've made that unusually easy to say here.
Thank you for the kind words. Yes, say it loud!
The other problem you bring up with grading someone just rewriting an AI ideated post vs AI drafted human idea is a whole ‘nother bag of worms I hadn’t even thought of! On the one hand, I don’t “care” about someone putting out an AI ideated post because I think the quality is going to be so sub-par it will not succeed. But it’s a real problem if the algorithm wrongly promotes the less creative work over the real thought leadership. It’s bad!
Robert, the backwards scoring you named is the sharpest part of this whole thread. It's measuring keystrokes when the actual ethical question is about judgment.
Someone can supply every real decision, what to say, what to hold back, what felt true, and have help finding the words, and someone else can supply nothing and just approve the output.
Those are entirely different acts. Pangram can't see the difference because it was never built to look for it.
It's scanning for typing style, not honesty, and treating those as the same thing is where the real irony lives."
You have a point I hadn't think about yet... "The scanner can't distinguish between someone who supplied every idea and had a machine phrase them, and someone who took every idea from a machine and retyped it in their own words." thank you for giving me something more to think about.
Hear hear. I’ve also failed to hone my AI to genuinely write “for” me. That said, it massively accelerates the iteration, editing & polishing.
Is the result “AI written?”
I frankly couldn’t care less.
Exactly!
I totally agree. When I write it can sometimes come out as a lot of text without cohesion.
I use AI to make it more readable. But it's still my writing.
I wholeheartedly agree with you. I tested it on several things I have written or used AI to help me write. It flagged my own writing that AI had no part of. But then said the show notes for a podcast episode were not AI when they were 100% AI written from a podcast transcript. I am skeptical of it. Some of us business owners are using AI to write things we don’t have the capacity for like a podcast summary.
Yes! That’s what I was getting at in another comment. Some people are just writers and that’s it. Some people are full business owners who are coaching or consulting as their main thing with ten projects supporting that thing. The AI thing is a different conversation between those two groups. I care more about someone using AI who is hoping to get a Pulitzer than someone who is using AI to get visibility on her work. As someone who is kind of straddling the two groups rn because I do have a coaching practice but also really like writing, I’m very aware of both conversations.
As a second-language English blogger, your words are so warm and kind. I am actually facing this problem: an AI translated my writing into my mother tongue and then marked it as 100% AI-generated.
I was wondering whether there are any cases where English speakers need to write in another language and have to use AI.
One quick question: how did you turn it off?
That is so frustrating! Exactly what the problem is.
Ok, I’m not positive if this is all of it but I went to my own post and clicked the three dots, then it says scan for AI text. When that screen pops up, there is an option to disable scanning for AI text. I did that on this article. I don’t know if that does it universally though. You may have to do it article by article (which is insane).
There is only human slop, AI requires a human prompt, and there has always been slop and always will be slop.
A lot of the recent hype is fueled by the recent hype.
People hear about it -> people look for it -> people see it -> people react -> the algorithm sees the reaction -> the algorithm serves them more -> people react -> the algorithm sees the reaction...
Hopefully people will just forget about it in a couple weeks!
Humanity invents the most powerful tool in history.
Then panics.
“Quick! Find out who dared to use it!”
So we build an AI detector, powered by AI, to police the use of AI.
The confusion gets so bad that someone finally sends for Common Sense.
Common Sense reaches the door.
The system’s guards scan it.
“Unrecognised intelligence.”
Entry denied.
The guards congratulate themselves.
Common Sense loses his ships and calls Future.
Future arrives without permission.
He does not argue with the guards.
He makes them obsolete.
The detector becomes yesterday’s tool.
The outrage becomes yesterday’s news.
But Common Sense is still outside.
Lovely and dark. Really just a couple years away from dystopia unless we change course!
"Humanity invents the most powerful tool in history.
Then panics.
“Quick! Find out who dared to use it!”
So we build an AI detector, powered by AI, to police the use of AI."
😆 So funny 😆
Honestly, I see no point in having an AI scanner. I have a simple solution for myself in that I simply disable it on my posts.
I’m disabling mine as well. I hope that most people do the same
Hi Nancy, how do you disable that?
Unfortunately, they don’t yet have a global disable. You have to do it per post. A after you’ve written your post and hit the continue button at the very bottom of the next page is a disable button
It's so frustrating because you have to scan it to actually reach the disable button
THAT is where the problem is...follow the clicks and the money...
This. “You cannot outsource your judgment, your perspective, your critical thinking skills, your intuition, about a piece of writing. You cannot outsource the way a piece of writing moves you.”
I don’t use it because I just don’t want to, it’s not for me. But it’s not because I feel superior using or not using it.
I, like you stated above, rather cherish my judgment, my gut, when it comes to reading other people’s work. All this is going to do, I fear, is tear apart self-trust and human relationships. I hope not but. . . Bradbury was some kind of prophet and saw this on the horizon long before he died.
Okay, rant over. Thanks for your thoughts.
The dystopian characteristics are really troubling.
You ain’t lyin. Sadly, neither was Bradbury.
This was an excellent reflection on the whole debacle.
Thank you!
YES! Please say it louder! Human slops sucks too. Cant handle all this virtue signaling around AI. At this moment, all my LinkedIn and Instagram feed are thorp with this bs, as if the state of writing/content online as any better before AI.
Exactly!
This: Again, if you figured out how to get AI to say exactly what you wanted it to say, IDGAF who typed it out.
My sentiments exactly. The noise around this is ridiculous.
Yes!
“WITCH!” 😆
🧙😆
Thank you Nikki, you put exactly my thoughts into words.
I’m glad it resonated!
Niki! This article was so good. But first, I love that you’re a coach! I got certified as a holistic and executive coach in the last couple years. I took clients last year but slowed down. Now I want to bring that back again. I love meeting a fellow coach!
As for your article, I resonated so much with it. I am a big advocate for AI and its ability to expand what humans can do. And I also don’t write with AI. At least not stuff that is directly tied into my brain, heart, soul, values, purpose. Emails, fine. Straight up tutorials, fine. But writing about the human experiences, conversations, reflections, all me.
And similar to you, I’ve experimented with AI using my voice. But omg I hate it so much. It’s kind of amusing what it’s taken away from how I write, but it just misses the mark so spectacularly that I just can’t.
One point your article made me think of was how maybe if you have a strong voice, writing with AI directly isn’t the tool for you. I do consult with it, get its feedback on what I could be missing, maybe pick up a phrase, but that’s pretty rare.
But if you’re just starting out and developing your voice, then having AI as a voice substitute is maybe the top of your ability at the moment.
But that being said, I don’t want to do this comparison game of “maybe this reason it’s good and that reason it’s bad.” It just feels like picking hairs when I want to do other things with my time lol.
Thank you for writing this piece. I’m working on a community piece through my paid community, the HART Studio. It’ll come with an interactive graph because everyone’s answers were so so good I can’t cut any of them haha.
I’m glad to have connected with you! I’d been seeing your name floating about, and I’m so excited to have finally met you directly. ☺️
Thank you! I love that and I’ll look at your community. The point you bring up about the comparison game is so right, that’s what I keep thinking about. I love to talk to people about AI because it’s exciting to share ideas. But it makes me so uncomfortable to even read how everyone is explaining what they do now because it is definitely coming from a justification place and I don’t want that for anyone.
It’s a build with AI together community! And it’s built around live sessions on Zoom where we build in real-time together. I just launched it maybe three months ago, and just had the first proper build session last week. It’s been an amazing experience.
PS. I love how you set up your coaching offers in this post. This is the kind of thing I need to start setting up…
Many great points here. The thing is, we can all control how we react. We don't have to be aghast because someone's content was flagged as having some AI, but, I'm going to guess people will. You're point about slop can be written by humans is well taken, and I hadn't considered it before.
The most ironic part to me is the AI detector is AI; it's not a person reading it saying "Yep, 14% AI." So, a person will get upset reading that an AI detector indicates some of their favorite creator's work is partially AI? Does not make sense to me.
It’s crazy! How are people not caring about that?
I fully agree with your detailed, carefully considered appraisal of using AI as an assistant but not an author.
Exactly!