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Believe Me, I’m Not a Robot

And apparently, I write like a NYT columnist

Tom Hanratty
ILLUMINATION

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Photo by Lyman Hansel Gerona on Unsplash

After I write a piece for either my Substack blog or a posting for Medium.com, a human edits my work, and I make the appropriate adjustments. Then, I run the edited piece through Grammarly and accept or dismiss their grammar suggestions.

My final due diligence is running the anti-plagiarism program from Grammarly to ensure I haven’t unintentionally used someone else’s work.

Imagine my surprise last week when the Grammarly program told me that fully one-third of my original piece showed signs of being written by a robot.

This is not an insignificant matter. I’m sure the editors at Medium use a similar program or algorithm to check on submissions, and if my writing gets flagged, I’ll be bounced from Medium, cutting me off from my global readership.

Recently, one of my blog readers commented that a piece I published could have been written for the New York Times. I took this as a compliment.

I subscribed to the New York Times and the Washington Post as a young adult. I’d sit with my Webster’s English Dictionary at my side, copying and looking up words from the articles that were new to me.

Now, I’ve learned that the developers of the AI Large Language Models trained their…

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