We taught the machine to write by feeding it our writing, and now that it sounds like us, sounding like ourselves gets us flagged as “AI generated”; so we contort our voice to prove we are human, and lose the thing that makes our voices ours.
I like writing, mainly for myself as a way to force deeper thinking about a topic I’m interested in, but also to maybe share something with others. Writing is hard, though; trying to remember all those high school english rules - should that last “though” have had a comma before it, did I need to use a semi-colon there, when am I allowed to use a hyphen, where did we land on double-spaces after full-stops 1, and crap, now this sentence is way too long…
So, like most folks these days I use AI to help. Knowing how much to use AI is the tough part. Too much and you sound like every other AI-generated-LinkedIn-post, too little and maybe not as many people can be bothered to write? Maybe those to whom English is a second language put writing in the “too hard” basket when they actually have interesting thoughts to share?
One of my recent posts happened to get noticed by enough people (still not sure how 2) that it spent a day on the front page of HackerNews
It was mostly positive, which was great (if a little surprising). I did get a couple of comments calling it “yet another AI-slop article”, with one going so far as to post a screenshot of what looked like an online “AI writing evaluator” tool, confidently scoring one specific paragraph as 100% AI generated.
I pointed my AI system at the comments section and asked it whether there was anything worth engaging with. It strongly suggested not replying to the negative comments, so of course I did. I acknowledged that there was no way to “prove it”, but that I did actually write that paragraph and so found it interesting that it was identified as AI - that was the spark that led to this post.
The conclusion I’ve come to, and recognised again and again in my writing over the past year or so, is that this is unavoidable (and by design). We train AI on all of our writing, so AI sounds more and more like us, then by that same evidence, our own writing sounds more and more like AI generated content.
I haven’t done this, but if I went back through all of my writing I’m fairly sure I’d find a few “AI tells”, like em dashes, lists of three, “it’s not X, it’s Y” sentences, etc. Also, any writing citing lots of stats, or quoting others, seems to be more likely to get flagged 5.
So I’ve caught myself subconsciously avoiding AI-tells, and even consciously editing my writing after-the-fact to sound “more human”. It’s fuckin tiring 6.
In some weird, twisted irony, I found jumping through these hoops so tiring that I actually created a skill for my AI system which contains all the latest and most common AI-tells, but also details of my writing style/voice, which I can then use to review and de-AI-ify my writing. But I’m throwing it in the bin - from now on if I feel like using an em dash, or happen to have 3 bullet points in a post, c’est la vie.
I’ve written about this issue before , so why am I still thinking (and writing) about this? Well, because we’re all still adapting to AI in just about every aspect of life. In that earlier post I talked about how I came up with the guidelines for my AI to sound less-AI, but still used AI to draft outlines and even first drafts, but that’s shifting. Lately I’ve found it less work to just write my own rambling first draft, and then get AI to review and suggest edits, than it is to try to edit an AI-generated draft, for precisely the reasons that Eve Fairbanks described (and nailed IMO) in this series of tweets 8.
It’s been refreshing. I can’t churn out writing like a machine; I need to be in the write mood 9, actually give a shit about the topic, have time to focus, a coffee (or whisky, depending on the time of day), etc - essentially all the stars need to align - but when it clicks it’s fun again like writing was before AI.
So am I saying “throw away the AI”? No, mostly because we don’t always have that luxury of time to write something, particularly for work where there are usually deadlines - so if you need AI to unstick that design doc or travel proposal, use the tools available to you. Even then though, perhaps do so a little more deliberately, with your eyes open to what the impact is of doing so.
In my experience it also gets simpler. Funny that! Who could’ve guessed that repetition makes something easier? That’s why you’re here though; for the nuanced nuggets of novel knowledge, and my l33t writing skillz.
Cheers, Dave
In case anyone was wondering, I am firmly in camp two-spaces, and struggle daily on the battlefield of autocorrection, text-editors, and now AI - all of which keep “correcting” me back to single spaces. I will fight on! ↩︎
Happy about the [resulting tweet](https://x.com/mitchellh/status/2065153466079801714)
by Mitchell Hashimoto though 😅 [↩︎](https://curlewis.co.nz/index.xml#fnref:2)
For the curious (or morbid), [here’s the thread](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48489402)
. [↩︎](https://curlewis.co.nz/index.xml#fnref:3)
I think this was why that specific paragraph of mine might’ve been flagged; it contained some numbers and quotes from other articles. Although when I myself ran that section against a similar tool, out of curiosity, it came back as <2% likely to be AI generated. So now I have no idea… maybe the comment poster was just trolling. 🤷♂️ ↩︎
Jason Koebler wrote a piece I read recently titled “Your AI Use Is Breaking My Brain ” which got me thinking about the cognitive load of constant authenticity-checking, culminating in the quote “I feel like I’m going nuts”. ↩︎
A quote from a piece titled “Losing your accent ” from Paul Thompson, a colleague and senior engineering leader in the Gen-AI space. This post of his was the second spark prompting me to write this, after I’d urged him to post more 😆 - so the cycle is complete. ↩︎
I also recommend reading the post “The Biggest Tell That Something Was Written by AI ”, which coincidentally was how I discovered that Eve lives in South Africa. Random tie back home for me. ↩︎
lol, this was an actual typo that my AI identified as a clever pun, so I’m claiming it!! ↩︎