And when I force myself to read AI-generated text I realize I'm making my brain do creative work to impart meaning to the words. It is exhausting because my brain is literally trying to do a just-in-time rewrite of the text into something valuable.
Something is deeply wrong with AI generated output, and I say this as someone who is typically very impressed by AI.
So, “Please write a one-liner comment manually to replace these 5 lines of AI generated comment” is a common refrain in my PR reviews to colleagues.
Which might even make sense, because there were always (still are?) those horrible ads in the chumbox area of news sites that used trypophobia and other creepy body-horror stuff to get you to click. [1] So maybe the hope is that you don't really look closely at the quiche, but some reptilian party of the brain gets oddly activated and drives you towards the restaurant?
1. https://medium.com/the-awl/a-complete-taxonomy-of-internet-c...
"There's an ongoing discussion of whether humans are good at recognizing AI-generated text. While most research claims that humans don't really do a good job there, I disagree. "
I wonder if humans that spend all day working in tech are good at recognizing AI-generated text, but people who spend all day doing jobs that don't involve computers aren't as good.And I wonder if those of us in tech are the only ones who really care?
Despite seeing a lot of them, I cannot think of one AI-generated photo that I can picture clearly in my mind; a few are partial but elusive. Whereas I can recall (visualise) a whole bunch of traditional photographs.
The same is true of AI generated text. Only the annoyances stick. I cannot recall real details of text I have generated, until I commit it to memory some other way.
I don't think this is about ephemerality either. If we assume it's about celebrated/famous/infamous images, there are definitely non-ephemeral, cultural moments in AI generated in particular, like Boris Eldagsen's Sony Prize winner:
https://petapixel.com/2023/04/14/artist-refuses-prize-after-...
This really should be memorable, but isn't. I had forgotten the second person is in the image.
Or Jason Allen's fake painting:
https://petapixel.com/2022/09/01/ai-generated-artwork-wins-f...
I had already forgotten there's more than one figure in it, and I only looked at it a few weeks back. I remember the colour, the bright circle, some vague hints of texture; one figure. And that is it. Only the crudest shape elements.
For me, something about AI-generated text and images confounds recall. It is really peculiar.
I think they may just be to trusting and/or naive. People in tech right now are hyper aware of this and are actively looking while people outside of that bubble barely give it a second thought.
I have no idea if other people who work in tech are better than average or not, because I don't feel confident in being able to check their work. That being said, I do think that there's a general trend of people in tech tending to be a bit overconfident in how well they will do at some new task they haven't encountered before, so when someone tells me that they can easily tell whether text is AI generated, it's hard for me to trust it any more than I trust someone who makes a similarly strong claim about something that they can use AI successfully for when it's not something that I can easily measure (e.g. learning a new language without getting feedback from people who are fluent from real-world usage).
All that being said, I do think the set of people who care is larger than just those in tech, although it's probably still a relatively small group overall. From conversations with people in other domains, there are contingents in non-tech communities who tend to have a large representation of negative views towards AI (artists, writers, musicians, other jobs where people are skeptical of human creativity being replaced by AI), and often times the people who feel negatively in those groups will be even more adamantly opposed to interacting with any AI content than people in tech. To be clear, I'm not at all trying to generalize and say "all artists hate AI" or anything like that, since there's obviously a wide variety of viewpoints within any sizable community, but I've definitely seen many people who say they will refuse to play any game that's suspected of using AI for generating art assets, and even some who don't differentiate between using AI for generating assets versus code (either because they aren't knowledgeable about how different aspects of game development work, or they genuinely don't care because they view AI as a categorical evil).
* https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/975017/, https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6ZnznCaTcbGYsCmqu/, https://spiralism.website if you want to test how strong your defenses are against this particular meme
There's no real edge to it. Same as with the writing. The stuff that you'd latch onto (and thus remember) is simply not there, precisely because those image or word choices would be just outside its latent probability space. But because they're well inside it, your mind sees nothing novel to register.
This is also why I think human output will actually increase in value. When any AI can just "phone it in", something genuinely human will stand out (to us, not the AI) and become a bellwether.
This will literally help us realize what it means to be human.
I also don't think the solution is simply to "make responses more random", either. That might help solve novel problems (the same way that throwing darts randomly at a dartboard eventually hits the bullseye of the dartboard right next to it that no one considered), but I don't think it will help it "seem more creative".
Sometimes I'll check in on my sleeping kid and she'll sit up in bed and say some utter nonsense. I'll find it hilarious, giggle silently to myself, and kiss her goodnight again and she'll close her eyes and lie back.
Why I try to tell her about her sleep-talking in the morning, though, I find that the words she said have completely disappeared from my memory, no matter how funny I thought they were at the time.
In my head-canon, this is because it's dream language, and slips away as easily as dreams. But, like the AI art, it could be because it's bullshit: completely devoid of content, all signifiers and no signified.
Quike? Cache?
I stopped after I wrote something on the pad while I was still asleep. Woke up to text with letters that were backwards, upside down, weird words — so close to real words that I was sure I ought to know what they meant and had really meant to write them down.
Scared me. Literally too weird to keep. I tore up the page. Like when you find some horrifying small animal skull or parasitically hollowed out beetle as a child and you put it away safely in a box so that you never have to look at it again.
They were actually rather good, and the eerie early-DALL-E quality to them really helped the spookiness.
But I can only remember the feelings with any clarity.
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Recently I've been catching myself having these little moments at work, when I'm trying to read a document someone has sent me and my brain somehow refuses to analyze it. It feels like I'm reading it, but I'm unable to focus on its content.
I end up getting dragged into an endless back and forth with the sender, asking questions about things that have been covered in what they've already sent me. It's rather concerning, because I've spent the last year trying to re-learn how to focus and these situations show the exact opposite.
I sat down to analyze these situations and realized they all have a common denominator: the documents all show a strong trace to AI.
For example:
A design document that looks like a copy-paste from Claude. While it does cover the design of the specific feature in question, it also carries a lot of Claude-specific analysis and lingo. "This cuts just through it", "The first gate is real".
or
A 20-page marketing concept deck that mixes up (a rather reasonable) marketing strategy with some nonsense product technical architecture gibberish. How does it pitch the idea? "It's not selling X, it's selling Y". "The Redis backbone redefines the product".
or
A technical requirements document that describes a rather simple concept in a very verbose way. The thing is, a lot of this document reads like someone's "internal" reasoning that's not fully sure about certain decisions. Sounds like an LLM to me.
There's an ongoing discussion of whether humans are good at recognizing AI-generated text. While most research claims that humans don't really do a good job there, I disagree. It's not that difficult, at least when we're talking about the low-effort results. Florian Roth wrote a pretty good summary of the common patterns in the context of social media.
I see a similar thing happening for work-related texts. Besides the obvious choice of words, the general flow of sentences and the attempt to pitch every small detail as a breakthrough quickly give it away. If your document describes the checkboxes in an RBAC configuration view for an enterprise application, don't sell it like you've just invented fire.
I feel like I've been "pre-trained" on all the AI-generated LinkedIn posts, emails and websites that are full of text but empty on meaning. My brain learned to quickly spot signs of AI-generated content, at least the content generated with low effort, and it now ignores it and moves on without thinking much about it.
I've heard some people comparing it to "banner blindness". It's not surprising. With the amount of content being pushed at us, filtering it out is how we need to stay sane.
What's fascinating to me, is that the same AI that was supposed to make me more productive, is what's now slowing me down in an unexpected way.
I don't usually go on vacation, but this year I really needed a break. One evening I was really hungry, walking past some restaurants on the Baltic coast. There was a single one I immediately ignored, but a minute later something in my head asked "Hey, did they really put up a photo of quiche with mold?" I walked back just to see this.

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