AI content and fake hair

“All toupées look fake; I’ve never seen one that I couldn’t tell was fake.”

This is the Toupée Fallacy, and I was reminded of it by the endless stream of social media posts that want to teach you how to spot AI-generated content:

• Watch out for fancy punctuation—like the em-dash. Who even writes like this?

• Suspicious words: Let's rather not delve into those.

• 🚀 Too 👏 many 💠 emojis.

However, the biggest tell of bad AI-generated content is that it's so bland and formulaic.

But if someone were to use AI to

• brainstorm

• critique

• point out gaps

• suggest additional examples

• iteratively edit their writing

and then incorporates that feedback in their own words, you could never tell that they used AI. It would be like figuring out if I used a calculator when answering 12 x 12 = 144.

Shouldn't we instead focus on quality? The main problem with lazily generated AI content is that it is bland, generic, and tepid. But so is lots of 100% free-range human-created content.

If a text is genuinely inspiring and insightful, and the author crafted it with the help of AI, all the power to them. Isn't a significant promise of generative AI that it elevates our creative powers?

I'd be curious to hear if you've had particularly bad (or awesome) experiences with AI-generated content.