The Biggest Tell That Something Was Written By AI

A crash in Johannesburg led to a frantic driver sending a lengthy, perfectly grammatical message explaining the incident. A mechanic’s reply used the same distinctive voice associated with AI. People often report distrust of AI-generated writing, yet many use it for everyday tasks like emails, personal messages, shopping lists, and scripts for arguments. AI writing is also appearing in opinion pages, books, and literary magazines. Professional editing has revealed submissions with clean punctuation, uniform length, evenly paced paragraphs, and a breezy yet grandiose tone. Some writers now treat AI as a writing tool similar to spell-check or a laptop, using it for quotes or for drafting long essays from brief prompts.

"In surveys, people consistently say they distrust AI-generated writing. But that hasn't stopped more and more of us from using it in everyday life-to compose work emails and personal texts, to make shopping lists, even to write scripts for arguments with our spouses. "I feel like I'm going nuts," the writer Jason Koebler complained in the tech outlet 404 Media, under "the cognitive load" of trying to discern whether every piece of text he reads is real or fake."

"AI writing is also creeping into our most elite literary spaces- newspapers' opinion sections, books, literary magazines. I edit professionally, often working with authors renowned for their prose. Maybe two months ago, I began receiving a kind of submission I'd never gotten before: perfectly clean, without a stray comma; uniform in length, with evenly paced paragraphs and a distinctive tone that was simultaneously breezy and grandiose."

"At first I was surprised that people who prided themselves on their writing would turn to AI to write for them. Even six months ago, when I occasionally identified a paragraph in a writer's work that seemed AI-generated, they would apologize. Now some authors tell me they've embraced AI as a "writing tool," no different from spell-check or a laptop."

"The phrase is protean and euphemistic, covering everything from using ChatGPT to find a quote to having it compose a long essay based on a two-sentence prompt. The reason for the change is simp"

Read at The Atlantic