In an age of proliferating generative AI, human content is increasingly difficult to find.
Wait, that’s already sounding like AI nonsense.
Nowadays with all this soulless AI-generated guff sprawling over the upper surface of the internet, trying to find high-quality, genuine human content is like trying to cancel a streaming subscription.
Hm. Still sounds like nonsense. Welp, it’s still my nonsense, so we’ll roll with it.
This is how it goes. You search up a question or how-to, skip past the ads and AI answer that now cover the entire screen, and find some article or blog post. It looks promising. So you click on, and yeah, it seems fine, well-written, maybe even like they have half an idea what they’re talking about.
Then you get to a fairly chonky paragraph, and a sinking feeling comes. There’s just something about the way it reads, a déja vu maybe, as if you’ve read this exact thing before.
So you fire up Scribbr’s AI detector, and ctrl+CV.
100%.
Without fail. Not even like, 92% or something. 100% chance of AI generation.
How do you even do that. Like, surely if you even just slightly edit it, that would break the probability chain and bring that score down.
But no. 100%.
It’s honestly depressing.
And ofc, any writing is subject to inaccuracy and deserves skepticism, but when it’s AI – it’s great in places, no doubt about that, but it’s really, really prone to hallucinations (especially in coding, which is most of the stuff I’m reading). So now, of course, I have to call into question whether all of what I just read was total balderdash – code included.
This is the fall of the internet, as it mutates ever more into an AI zombie wasteland.
I enjoy experimenting with AI and discovering what sort of cool tricks I can do. It’s an awesome technology, driven by incredible computer science and mathematics. Either way, it’s probably better to be familiar with it than not.
But I don’t use it for writing. For one, I’m lucky enough to be competent (and proficient, I like to think) in English, the language of the internet, such that I have no problem writing things accurately and coherently for myself. And unlike most people, I genuinely find joy in writing about things I love, even when it’s difficult.
Everything you see read in Assort was lovingly handcrafted, painstakingly edited, every word agonised over. This is a lifelong project born out of love and time. Obviously,1 any use of AI would irreversibly damage its integrity.
As one does, I tried searching up ‘all blogs use AI reddit’ and found a reddit post asking if AI will kill blogs. Can you guess what one of the comments was?
100%.
Footnotes
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It takes a lot for me to use this word, btw. ↩