Stop Telling us How You Can Detect AI-Generated Text

You can’t!

Photo by Max Chen on Unsplash

I am so tired of seeing those posts. People lying through their noses about their uncanny skill at detecting AI-generated texts.

“This is how I know you used AI”

“I am a professional editor, these 7 things tell me you used AI”

And many others of similar sorts.

It’s becoming infuriating seeing posts like these. These claims are made with so much confidence, so they get thousands of likes and comments. Notwithstanding, they’re all BS.

It’s all ego and intellectual dishonesty.

I’ve been a writer for the longest time, but it was in 2019 that I decided to take it seriously. I started writing on Medium, and in 2021 I set up a blog that I ran with a friend.

Something happened late 2022 when ChatGPT arrived.

My friend wrote an article and asked me to assess it. It was a test. We wanted to know if any of us could detect AI text.

I scanned the article with as much scrutiny as I could muster. It took me a while, but at the end I couldn’t tell. I was rattled by this inability to say with any degree of certainty whether the article was AI-generated or not. I had thought I could.