Hi Ala,

What if you could instantly and flawlessly identify a piece that was written, either fully or partially, by an AI tool at any point? How would you use this detection tool?

For many people, knowing a piece of writing is AI generated is a shorthand for knowing if it’s trustworthy.

What most of us don’t want is to spend our time reading something that someone else didn’t really write, be it a short story, a work report, a listicle. “Write” isn’t just putting words down; it’s a full-throated process: living something, thinking about it, talking about it, writing about it, developing the story, polishing the story, shaping the story for where it’s going to land. You can't do that by saying "generate this article" to an AI chatbot.

Even if two people by complete random chance posted the exact same story, only one was from lived experience, and the other was the result of a perfectly crafted prompt into ChatGPT, most of us would want to know because there’s much more trust for the former than the latter.

But think about what passes the bar for trustworthiness. Is it entirely about using AI?

There was untrustworthy writing long before AI, and there will be after, too. Some non-AI writing will never be worth a read because it’s written in a deceptive, untrustworthy way.
Some writing that uses AI (translations, or for accessibility reasons, just for example) can be trustworthy because the writer still cares, and the care comes through in the writing.

We find when readers want to know if something is AI generated, they are not really asking, “Is this AI or not AI?” They’re asking: “Can I trust this?”

That’s the amazing thing about reading great stories. It can change your life. But you need to trust the writing, the writer, the process they took to create this piece and set it before you, to allow it to do that most magical of things that reading a good piece of writing can do: change your life, in some big or small way, for the better.