After reading Bryan Cantrill’s blog on reading and then reading the linked Cynthia Dunlop report on AI-written blog posts I’ve instituted a new policy on my blog, which is to add a pangram verified link to my blogs going forward to verify that my writing is not AI-assisted or AI-generated.
I think this is important because as writers, we are demanding time and attention from our readers. As such we owe them an obligation that we are not wasting their time and attention. It’s clear that no-one likes AI-writing, so much so that Cynthia found that,
if readers think your article is AI-assisted or AI-authored, most will immediately leave (78%), avoid you forever (71%), and try to downvote you if they can (57%). 17% try to finish but lose interest, and around 15% will only continue if the underlying insights seem authentic.
But beyond just not using AI for my writing, I think it might be useful and more respectful of my readers’ time if I can say at the outset that they are not needing to be on guard for AI-written content in what follows. Because one of the other findings from Cynthia’s report was that “73% [of those using LLMs] did not disclose that they used LLMs to write” their content.
This isn’t surprising in the slightest, and perhaps the only way to counter the rise of AI-written content is for human-written content to itself highlight that it is human-written. That will then put the spotlight on content that is not verifying itself as human-written. This may be a stop-gap until browsers add automatic AI-detection. We’ve already seen Claude add watermarks to Claude-output, so it can’t be long until the verification and detection of AI-written content is standardised across devices and software.
Until then, I’ll try to provide verification of my own writing on this blog.