No no, I know I was just talking about Grok, and we haven't had a falling-out by any standards. If anything, Grok's long been convinced by my humanity by the sheer amount of nonsense I ask it. Rather, a new client who seems quite fixated on AI content. I, of course, don't use AI in my writing, which I've told him several times, and am frankly a bit irritated by him suggesting otherwise.
However. I tried to put myself in his place for a moment, and figure fair enough, though he's unduly paranoid, it's a fair question. It's gotten to a place where you can no longer really tell if an article is artificially generated or written by a human. After I finished the most recent order, I started playing around with AI testing before delivering it. I ran a couple of articles through multiple AI checkers that I picked at random.
Naturally, the texts aren't AI, though they are formal and somewhat stiff. It's what these clients go for.
From a 1% chance of this being human-generated content to a whopping 100%, it varies quite a lot, which naturally leads one to the question ~ which robot can I believe?
A couple of the detectors suggested it was the formal and professional tone that accounted for the likelihood of my text being artificially generated. Apparently the simple fact that it doesn't use slang and does draw on correct grammar is enough to condemn it. I wondered what I might do to make the texts less suspicious. Write less formally? It's not really an option in this kind of writing. And would it matter much anyhow?
Just for an experiment, I then ran the beginning of a story I recently started. Fiction, somewhat disjointed sort of writing. I daresay if AI were trying to write a story, it would've used more traditional structure. I ran it through the detector that told me my article was 99% AI, and lo and behold, confirmed my suspicion. These detectors are rigged to detect AI where there is none so they can then sell you the magic pill. Go back to the picture above.
Anything catch your eye?
Bypass AI detectors by HUMANIZING YOUR TEXT!
To be fair, that particular detector correctly guessed my article to be human, but was no doubt selling something, also. Everyone is. But the phrasing struck me as particularly telling. So now, we're supposed to be humans paying AI to tell us how to make our writing sound more human? If that doesn't mindfuck you, I don't know what will.
Now, from a copywriting perspective, that doesn't entirely surprise me. Though it was highly lucrative for me during the pandemic, in recent years, I've moved away from AI and chosen to focus more on earning from my writing of choice (i.e. fiction and blogging). It was clear to me from early on that with the advent of AI, the days of human copywriting were numbered, and this confirms it. As long as there's some cash to be made here and there, it's good enough, but it's certainly not a profession I would counsel any young person to pursue.
It's more interesting to me from a human perspective. From a writer perspective. I'm no doom-sayer and fortunately, I know enough spaces where genuine human writing is still cherished. Hive being foremost among those, of course. If nothing else, it seems any forray back into my "old job" just reinforces how lucky I am to exist in this space (Hive).
It also highlights the importance, beyond art, of developing the things we'd like to say to the world. Because we so often don't. So much of our formal education and traditional employment emphasizes automation, regurgitating what you've been spoon-fed, sounding like everyone else. Except that was an infertile ground for humans to thrive on from the get-go, and now it's being run over by machines. Rightly so. It is, after all, an automated job. It's worth considering, though, where that leaves those of us who haven't got that much to say, who perhaps never took the time (or were never encouraged) to figure out what it is they have to say and how to say it.
Coming back to my title question - I don't know that I can convince a machine I'm not a machine, also. And I doubt I could convince this client. Personally, I'm not hugely bothered. I'd like to keep an ongoing working relationship. Everyone needs money, don't we? But I know better than to ascribe it more value than it carries. My future as a writer is elsewhere.
Our future as humans is elsewhere. It's in honoring that which is irreplicably ours to speak. And much of it lies in discovering (or remembering) that we have so much worth saying. We already exist inside a vast crisis of meaning in the West, yet I fear that will seem like paradise in a decade or two.
Most of us have an alarmingly poor grip on what it is to be us, to be human. It's right of AI to question it. It's worrying, frankly, that we don't, also.
Obviously, the image for this post is made in Canva. Though maybe not. Maybe that's what I look like now. Maybe it's all a mirage. It's getting hard to tell.