Spotting AI Writing

Certainly, here are some examples of text generated by large language models. It's not just the use of em dashes, but the use of negative parallel structures like this. Wikipedia has compiled a list of signs that a piece of text has been generated by AI. We may soon get to a point where we won't be able to accurately distinguish human- and AI-generated content—at least, not without setting deliberate traps. Will it matter?

Key concepts

Authorship and Authenticity: Whether it matters who made a text, if the text is good. Reading has always carried the assumption that a mind chose these words and stands behind them, and that assumption is what generative writing quietly removes — nobody asks who a calculator's answer belongs to.

Every work — at a glance

Large Language Models (technology)

Next-word predictors at enormous scale; the em dash and the tidy tricolon are habits, not fingerprints.

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What to know

01
Detection by style is built to lose, and the working alternative is not detection at all. The tells are borrowed from human prose, so they are trained away model by model, and detectors misfire hardest on writers whose fluency is already unusual. What the hidden-instruction trap actually caught was not a machine's style but the absence of a reader — a student who cannot explain the argument they handed in.

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Across subjects

Painting faced this first. Han van Meegeren's fake Vermeers hung as masterpieces and one was sold to Hermann Goering; he only proved they were his by painting

Theme connection

"Are We There Yet?"

Will it matter when nobody can tell? One case says enormously: trust, learning and credit all rest on a person having done the thinking. The other says we already accept unattributed work everywhere, and judging prose by quality rather than origin is fairer. Note that the paragraph opening this topic had you playing detective.

Practice — a sample

LITLennon's home tapes catch a song assembling itself. The Trojan Horse Prompt MOST supports asking students for —

A Their detector score
B Their reading history
C Their earlier essays
D Their citation manager file
E Their working drafts

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