Blink if you're human

Or human-ish

dynomight.net/blink

I write every word I post on this blog myself. I can’t prove this, of course, but there’s some evidence:

• This blog existed before AI could write blog posts.

• If you put any of my posts into an AI-detector they will (I assume) come back squeaky clean.

And now let me add this: I, dynomight, guarantee that every word I post here is the product of me physically hitting keys with my fingers. The only exceptions would be quotes from other humans or something that’s clearly labeled as an AI output.

How is that evidence? Well, say you think I’m a low quality person and I do use AI but I’m lying and I’ve figured out how to evade AI-detectors. OK, ouch. But consider: It’s extremely likely that AI-detectors will improve in the future. (More precisely, it’s likely that future AI-detectors will be better than current AI-detectors at detecting current AI.) If I were using AI, and a future AI detector later caught me, the fact that I made the above promise would be really embarrassing.

You may be thinking that this looks gross and self-congratulatory. So I’d like to stress that the above guarantee is carefully worded. I do often use AI “for research”, just not “for writing”. (We’ll come back to that distinction.) And I don’t think there’s anything intrinsically wrong with using AI to write blog posts. I don’t do it personally, mostly because:

1. I like writing.

2. The act of writing itself helps me figure stuff out.

3. This is a hobby. If you start automating your own hobbies—just what the hell are you doing?

I also don’t use AI for writing because—can we just admit it?—no one wants to read AI-generated essays. Or, rather, people love reading AI-generated essays, but when they want to read one, they will ask an AI for it themselves, thank you very much.

I know the counterarguments. What does it matter where the words came from? Shouldn’t you judge them on their own merits? Maybe. That’s a legitimate way to look at things. But empirically, I think most people don’t agree.

(I also know you’re counting the em-dashes. Count away, I’m still human.)

Here’s an oddly neglected question: Take all the essays that are AI-generated or heavily AI-assisted by one person and then given to someone else to read. In what percentage of cases does the first person disclose the AI usage? Ignore everything related to education if you want. You can even ignore emails. I suspect the answer is still <20%.

Why do people care about this? Several reasons. One is proof of work. If I, a human, write eight thousand plausible-seeming words about vitamin D, that proves that I’ve put some time and effort into understanding vitamin D. That suggests giving at some weight to my opinion, even if just to best exploit the wisdom of crowds. That doesn’t work if my essay is secretly AI-generated.

And writing isn’t just cold clinical information-sharing. It’s a kind of parasocial interaction. I know “parasocial” sounds sinister, but I maintain that parasocial relationships are often a perfectly healthy way to adapt our primitive social instincts to the modern world. Anyway, good or bad, that’s part of it.

I bring this up because I’m worried that blogs are heading into a sort of lemon market. You’ve surely had the experience of reading an essay only to slowly become dismayed as you realize it was AI-written. What’s the equilibrium? I expect that some people have already cut back on reading essays, at least from non-established authors. Over time, I expect this will lead to fewer humans writing essays, further increasing the density of AI-generated content, driving more people to cut back on reading, et cetera. This is bad because blogs are good.

As that cycle turns, social norms are also changing. Cast your mind back to the old world, five years ago. At that time, if you had started a blog and posted AI-generated essays without telling anyone, I’m reasonably certain that would have been considered a dick move. (Future generations will marvel.) But today, the largest corporations appear to do that all the time. There’s incredible momentum towards an world where AI can be used anywhere, for any purpose, with no disclosure, and that’s fine.

But it is fine! At this point, trying to bully people into proactive disclosure is just a tax on honesty / consciousness / integrity. Instead, I suggest we agree that arbitrary usage is, by default, fine. Instead, let’s work at the other end: If you have chosen to impose limits on your AI usage, then state those limits publicly. If you’re human, tell me.

Obviously, this is no panacea. People can lie. But they can’t do so without taking some reputational risk, because if you use AI and lie about it, how long will your secret stay safe? No one knows because for once the unpredictability of technological change is on our side.

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However. HOWEVER. I am not suggesting that we should bully writers into declaring that they are AI-free. I think that’s a terrible idea, because AI use comes on a spectrum. Already today, most people surely use it at least a little. (Do you avert your eyes when AI summaries come up at the top of search results?) Arguably, most people should use AI at least a little. We need to acknowledge that writing is entering the centaur era.

For context: Computers beat humans at chess in 1997. But for years after that, human + AI “centaur” teams could still beat both the best humans and the best chess AIs. Slowly, the value humans contribute to those teams has diminished, and today it’s somewhat unclear if centaurs still hold any advantage over pure AIs.

Humans are still better at blogging than AIs. (Though perhaps not better at literary short fiction.) In chess time, blogging is still pre-1997. But it’s a historical coincidence that no one seems to have cared about centaur chess before 1997. If people had tried, I suspet centaur chess teams could have beaten the best human players much earlier. So, to stretch our analogy, I’d put blogging around 1990 in chess time, in an alternate timeline where there was vast interest in centaur chess in the 1970s and 1980s.

I mean, what exactly can you do while still considering your essay “human written”? Can you:

1. …look at AI summaries at the top of search results?

2. …ask AI to find spelling or grammar errors?

3. …use AI as an advanced thesaurus? (“Give me 50 words with meanings interpolating between ‘aggressive’ and ‘punctilious’.”)

4. …ask AI factual questions when doing research?

5. …trust the answers, or verify them yourself?

6. …ask AI for options to rephrase an awkward sentence?

7. …use those options verbatim?

8. …ask AI for high-level organizational suggestions?

9. …ask AI to to make figures / tables / code?

10. …run an entire essay through an AI to “clean it up”?

11. …ask an AI to give a rough prototype of the next section?

I don’t feel super-comfortable saying this, but I sometimes do all of those except #7, #10, and #11.

Wait! Let me explain! I probably do #3 or #6 around once per post. For #5, I usually verify, but when trying to understand something, I read a lot of sources. I try to mentally mark AI-derived facts as unreliable, but I don’t formally track the provenance of every single part of my mental model. I rarely do #8, and even-more rarely accept the suggestions, because AI seems to dislike me as a person and wants to purify my writing of all life and personality. But, in want of a human editor, I sometimes find it helpful. And no matter what, if any information flows from AI into my writing, it does so through my fingers, being written in my own words, never cutting and pasting, not a single word, never-ever.

On a spectrum where 0 = “refuses to look at AI summaries in web searches” and 100 = “puts a single prompt into an AI and posts the output without revisions”, I’d put myself at, I don’t know, 10?

Again, saying all that feels gross. (Somehow it feels like admitting to something shameful and simultaneously an exercise in arrogant self-congratulation? It’s remarkable.) I don’t know how my position on that spectrum compares to other writers, because almost no one discloses any AI usage at all.

But come on people. Democracy dies in darkness! We’re now at the point where readers default to assuming some relatively high (and increasing) level. I’m convinced that many people use AI in ways that are almost completely unobjectionable, but they’re too scared to admit it. This muddies the distinction between different parts of the spectrum, and exacerbates the dynamic where people are too afraid to read anything, lest they later realize it is “slop”.

We need to come to terms with the idea that for most writers, the optimal amount of AI usage is not zero. I’m sure that most people would say that some kinds of usage are normal / expected / good, while other kinds are aberrant / duplicitous / slop. But people have different opinions, and this is all shifting as technology and culture develop.

Unsurprisingly, I like the idea of people drawing the line close to where I did. But I’m willing to accept a fairly wide range, provided you’re upfront about it. Usually, if I sense the invisible hand of heavy AI editing, I sigh and unsubscribe. But Trevor Klee (an excellent blogger) has a couple posts where he says, “here’s an output from ChatGPT I thought was interesting.” Not only did I not unsubscribe, I actually attempted to read that output.

Still, I think it’s important to draw some line, not just to communicate to the outside world, but also for yourself. There’s a very blurry boundary between using AI “for research” or “to catch grammatical errors” and using it “for writing”. It’s very easy to slip from asking AI factual questions, to asking it to find errors in what you wrote, to asking it to fix those errors, to asking it to generate whole paragraphs of text. Each of those steps is easy to justify. So if you want to operate at some position on the spectrum, it’s probably best to choose some boundaries and then enforce them.

(AI used in the construction of this post: None.)