I know we’re setting ourselves up for a fall when, on an off-day, we will unwittingly publish 3000 dry words written by ChatGPT on Nepal’s growing naval blockade. But most of the time we can tell when you’re sending us an article written by artificial intelligence, and when we suspect it, we run it through a system that gives us the score. If you think we haven’t noticed then it’s probably just because we’ve been too polite to tell you when we passed on your piece: we knew.
We’re a small team and we read a lot of pitches and articles sent to us on spec. This takes a long time that we’re happy to spend, and we’ve found some amazing writers who have gone on to be prolific and fascinating to read, here and elsewhere. We aim to be relaxed in how we handle talent, but we take very seriously our obligation to find and encourage new contributors. But the rise of the “AI-writer” threatens to bog us down, make our jobs tedious, and reduce the chance of new scribblers being found. When it takes longer to read an article than it took to generate it, we’ve all got a serious problem.
Most people have the good sense to be coy, and don’t tell us that the 2000 words they filed on the impact of global trade from Trump’s latest TRUTH SOCIAL post were not entirely written by themselves, but perhaps that will change too? We’ve even been sent an article which we were invited to run with two bylines: one of them the nominal author, and the other the name of the AI software which did 80 per cent of the work. You will not be surprised that we turned it down.
So please, be human. And if you want to clog people’s inboxes with words you’ve never read, then why not send it to one of our friendly rivals? Our commitment to running esoteric copy is sufficiently intense that we don’t need any artificial help driving away eyeballs.
(Oh, and if you must send us articles written by AI, at least have the sense to change the punctuation. If you suddenly use em dashes without spaces before and after them, it’s a tell even a human can spot.)
