𝚎 𝚏 𝚛 𝚎 𝚖

I hate hate hate this kind of lazy analysis which is becoming increasingly common. Now those of us who have been using because of X, Y and Not X but Y for decades before AI will be treated as suspect because we have learnt through hard work, and years of practice how to write clean, well considered sentences. Now, people who do not read widely enough, people who have not made a habit of reading great, clean sentences will immediately look for these and call it AI. I teach "the sentence" as the first module when I teach creative writing. I teach many of these so called tell tale signs of AI, many of which are actually useful ways of making a sentence clear. Writing does not have to be messy. It does not have to contain errors. It does not have to be sloppy to be human. You want a writer who respects the reader enough to think deeply about the sentence. Are more people using AI? Absolutely. Is that writing formulaic and soulless? Very often, yes. But these weird conclusive declarations of how to spot AI are useless and only harm writers who actually pay attention to craft, to voice, to clarity. Worse for me are when academics, who are notorious for completely soulless, opaque writing that no one has been able to read for the past 50 years complain about AI. Most academics write worse than AI. And maybe they might even find lessons there on how to make research clear and accessible. Lazy or incompetent editors, in news and academia, who cannot tell good writing from bad if it slapped them in the face are now up in arms about AI as if the old human slop they have been churning out was any better, as if there was some great age of human writing that was being lost. Before AI, journalists and academics have been producing, dead, formulaic work, impressive only to the in-group, all on their own. It is getting boring.