CREATORS
Yes, We Can All Sense ChatGPT Articles
Our collective gut feeling for AI generated content
At first, I couldn’t tell. I mean, I was truly amazed. We all were. In goes the prompt, three dots (…), seconds later, Content
Well, I’m less amazed now. I’m actually bored of AI generated articles.
Luckily, by reading a lot of such articles in here and across the blogosphere, I think I have started to develop a “feeling” for ChatGPT-generated content. So that, by now, I can have a look at an article and know in a couple of seconds if a human could have possibly written it.
I am pretty sure you can too. And this collective gut-feeling that we are slowly developing, might mean that AI-generated articles will gradually die off on their own.
So, let’s see if I can deconstruct what comprises my own gut-feeling and if it aligns with yours.
Elements of style: ChatGPT edition
Sentences and Pacing The sentences are a bit too elaborate and wordy, like whoever wrote them was too.. fond of themselves. This slows the pacing right down, with the text being slowly, indulgently spread like sugary jam over the slightly-stale bread of the paragraph and, oh my, the knife gets caught on a comma and the bread-paragraph falls, jam down. You know what I mean.
Tone & Voice The voice is… formal? No, this is not the right word. Sterile? No. Actually, it’s like ChatGPT goes out of its way to make sure to keep the reader at a safe distance: not too far as to seem impolite, and also not too close as to risk any wrong impressions of intimacy. Now that I think about it, is it possible that the last couple of years of content made GPT-4 COVID conscious? Two meters of writing distance, I am confident some tech-wiz will find that embedded in the model somewhere if they look close enough.
Vocabulary Well, ChatGPT seems to believe it gets a Gold Star for every synonym or alternative way to express essentially the same idea. Over and over. Repeatedly. On a loop. Persistently. Or, as the cool kids down at the club used to say, “ad infinitum”. The club’s now closed, by the way. Completely shut down. And the kids have left. Now they’ re grown ups. Working at Google, or something.
Authenticity and Serendipity This is the biggest tell for me. It’s like reading high-school essays. The ideas seem taken straight from the teacher’s manual for “appropriate points to address”. Don’t get me wrong, the level of the essays is good. George-who-sits-at-the-front-row good. Every teacher would be delighted to read them. I am not a teacher. Most people in here aren’t. And those who are might prefer not to read essays after working hours.
Conclusions
This is good news. A collective gut feeling and aversion to AI-generated writing means that it will eventually die out of its own.
Don’t get me wrong, ChatGPT is an excellent tool. But if you’re using it to generate whole articles, it might be a good idea to refrain from just copy-pasting them. Have a look through them, get some inspiration, but then write the article yourself. Nobody wants to read AI-generated content and certainly nobody will pay to read it. Well, maybe we did, at first. But it seems humans can tell AI generated writing apart rather easily**. We have a feeling for it, as the kids down at the club used to say. And you know what happened to that club.
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* Unlike written content, AI-generated images are amazing!
** If this changes in the near future, which it might, I’ll re-write the article, I promise! But if AI generated content gets to be on par with a very good human writer, I don’t know if I will have anything to complain about really.
