A few years ago, while I was covering the rise of AI slop on Facebook, I asked my friends and family if they were getting AI spam fed into their timelines and if they could send me examples. A handful of them responded, sending me obviously AI-generated science fiction scenescapes, shrimp Jesus, and forlorn, starving children begging for sympathy. But a few of my friends sent me images that they thought were AI but were not. Their mental guard was up to the point where they were looking at human-made art and photos and thought it safer to dismiss them as AI rather than be fooled by it.To browse the internet today, to consume any sort of content at all, is to be bombarded with AI of all sorts. People think things that are fake are real, things that are real are fake. Much has been written about \u201cAI psychosis,\u201d the nonspecific, nonscientific diagnosis given to people who have lost themselves to AI. Less has been said about the cognitive load of what other people\u2019s AI use is doing to the rest of us, and the insidious nature of having to navigate an internet and a world where lazy AI has infiltrated everything. Our brains are now performing untold numbers of calculations per day: Is this AI? Do I care if it\u2019s AI? Why does this sound or look or read so weird? Does this person just write like this? Is this a person at all?\u00a0I see AI content where I\u2019m conditioned to expect and ignore it: In Google\u2019s \u201cAI Overviews\u201d that famously told us to eat glue pizza, in engagement-bait LinkedIn posts, and throughout our Facebook and Instagram feeds. But increasingly I have the feeling that it\u2019s everywhere, coming from all directions, completely unavoidable. It\u2019s not exactly that I have a revulsion to AI-assisted content or don\u2019t want to get fooled by it. It\u2019s that something is happening where my brain has become the AI police because everything feels incredibly uncanny. I will be going about my day reading, watching, or listening to something and, suddenly, I notice that something is wildly off. Quite simply, I feel like I\u2019m going nuts.\u00a0An example: Last week, in a desperate attempt to avoid yet another take on the White House Correspondents Dinner shooting, I was listening to an episode of Everyone\u2019s Talkin\u2019 Money, a podcast I\u2019ve been listening to off-and-on for years about taxes (yikes). This podcast has been going on for years, has a human host named Shari Rash, and hundreds of episodes. Rash started reading the intro script: \u201cThe shift I want you to make today\u2014and this is the shift that changes everything\u2014is starting to see your tax return as information\u2014not a bill, not a badge of shame, but information.\u201d The script went on and on and on like this, with AI writing trope after AI writing trope. My brain shut down and stopped paying attention to the script and started wondering if Rash was using AI just for the intro script? What about for the research? Did she edit the script at all? I turned the podcast off.\u00a0Later that day, I was scrolling the Orioles Hangout forums, a small community of diehards obsessed with the Baltimore Orioles that I have been lurking on for decades. Until recently, it had been one of the few places on the internet that I could safely assume was not full of AI. Except now, it is. The site\u2019s administrator has started using AI to analyze player performance and to help him write some of his posts. To his credit, he explains how he\u2019s using AI and prefaces these posts by noting they are AI-assisted analysis. Some of them are interesting. But now, most days I\u2019m browsing the forums, I will see arguments between posters who have been there for years that seem overly generic or don\u2019t really make sense. One recent post arguing about the timetable for an injured player\u2019s return suggested a ludicrously long recovery. One poster pointed this out: \u201cYou said 10-18 months and I said it won\u2019t take that long for a position player.\u201d The poster responded: \u201cYou\u2019re right I did. The 10-18 months was an AI generated answer \u2026 consider it a small cautionary tale about trusting AI and another on the benefits of seeking out actual medical research on questions like this.\u201d Every day I now scroll the forum and see people noting that they plugged something into ChatGPT or Gemini and have copy pasted the answers for other people to see. In this 30-year-old community of human beings discussing sports, AI is unavoidable.\u00a0It is, of course, not just me. Friends send me screenshots of texts they\u2019ve gotten from people they\u2019ve started dating, wondering if they\u2019re using ChatGPT to flirt. I\u2019ve gotten obviously AI-generated apologies or excuses from people trying to bail on a social engagement. I\u2019ve been to weddings where the speeches felt\u2014and were\u2014partially AI-generated.\u00a0A recent PEW poll showed that people believe it is important to be able to tell whether an image, video, or piece of writing was AI-generated, AI-assisted, or written by a human. And it showed that a majority of people do not believe that they are able to tell the difference between AI-generated works and human made works. Studies have repeatedly shown that humans judge AI-generated art and writing more harshly than human works, and a study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology found that when people know or perceive a piece of writing to be AI-generated, it is \u201cstubbornly difficult to mitigate\u201d and \u201cremarkably persistent, holding across the time period of our study; across different evaluation metrics, contexts, and different types of written content.\u201d Put simply, it is not just me who hates AI writing or finds it annoying. Even if AI writing can be \u201cfine,\u201d it very often feels bland, weird, formulaic. The writer Eve Fairbanks wrote a thread the other day that I thought more or less nailed it: \u201cThe tell for AI isn\u2019t rhythm, wording, or fact errors. It\u2019s that problems with *all these elements* exist equally & at once.\u201d\u00a0\u201cWith AI writing, everything is off: the tone grates, individual word choices baffle, the structure lacks sense, key pieces of argument are missing\u2026the key is that they all exist simultaneously to the same degree,\u201d she added. \u201cSuperficially, AI text can read smoothly\u2014\u201ccleaner\u201d than a human\u2019s draft \u2026 but it\u2019s almost impossible to make sensible. And it\u2019s driving me crazy.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Last week, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani tweeted about swastikas being painted on synagogues in Queens: \u201cThis is not just vandalism\u2014it is a deliberate act of antisemitic hatred meant to instill fear,\u201d he wrote. Max Spero, the CEO of Pangram Labs, an AI detection firm, highlighted this passage and tweeted \u201cMamdani nooo ,\u201d the implication being that this passage was written by AI, or at least seemed like it was. Spero\u2019s tweet had more than 4 million views at the time I talked to him. (Disclosure: Pangram Labs previously advertised on 404 Media).Spero\u2019s company uses AI to detect AI writing, meaning it is not perfect. But as far as these tools go, Pangram is considered quite good, and has been widely used in research about AI content on the internet. Spero told me when I called him that immersing himself in the internet has his brain in AI-detection mode pretty much all the time. \u201cI\u2019m totally on guard, and I have been for a while,\u201d he said. Spero said he first began to notice it on restaurant reviews on Yelp and Google Reviews a few years ago. \u201cI started seeing them everywhere. There\u2019s people who are Yelp Elite and all they do is post one or two AI-generated reviews a day. Fast forward to today, and I think we\u2019ve seen the mainstream growth of AI everywhere, but I think some people can tell, and some people have no intuition for it.\u201d\u00a0I have always aspired to write like I talk. I don\u2019t really concern myself so much with the craft of writing or turning a beautiful sentence, I usually try to just convey information in a straightforward, personable way. I want my articles to feel like slightly more polished, more researched versions of my text messages, like the things I would say on a podcast or at the bar to a friend. Often my writing process involves me thinking about sentences or ideas I want to convey while I\u2019m walking my dog or in the shower or surfing, and I hope that when I actually sit down to write, the words flow from my brain through the keyboard in a way that pretty much makes sense.\u00a0When I sat down to write this article, in which, to be clear, I did not use AI, I found myself writing the following sentence: \u201cIt\u2019s not just in places we\u2019re conditioned to see AI\u2014Google AI overviews, LinkedIn influencer posts, and Facebook feeds\u2014I\u2019ve started seeing AI\u2026\u201d I stopped typing, freaked out, and deleted the sentence. Have I always written this way? I honestly don\u2019t know.\u00a0This negative parallelism\u2014\u201cit\u2019s not just x, it\u2019s y\u201d is maybe the most infamous AI writing-ism there is. It is something that is regularly called out as being obviously AI, and is the formation in the sentence Mamdani wrote that Spero called out. But I didn\u2019t use AI. Did I use that construction because I\u2019ve been immersed on an internet full of generic AI writing on every platform all day everyday for years? Or did I just happen to think that was the best way to phrase it at the time?\u00a0The idea that humans may be subconsciously mimicking or learning from the AI writing that they\u2019re reading is not some isolated thought I had. It\u2019s kind of the business model of any number of AI-for-education startups, and it\u2019s an idea that has been raised in lots of articles about AI in schools. Last month, the New York Times quoted a teacher who said \u201cThey are using generative A.I. to write before they learn how to write.\u201d Teachers I spoke to last year lamented that they are spending their very real human hours and considerable brain power trying to determine whether they are grading essays that are written by humans or robots, and know that they are often giving writing notes on papers that were likely written by AI.\u00a0The thing is, human writers do sometimes write like AI, and this will probably become more common. \u201cIf you showed me the Mamdani tweet in a vacuum I\u2019d be like, almost certainly it\u2019s AI,\u201d Spero said. \u201cBut with Mamdani I\u2019m less sure because his history is almost everything else seems to be human written. With my own writing, I don\u2019t want to sound like AI even a little bit. I have some concerns about, like, the students who have grown up with ChatGPT and their entire school career has been ChatGPT assisted so now they actually do write like this.\u201d\u00a0Fairbanks had the same thought, and she told me that the person she originally wrote her thread about claims that he actually didn\u2019t use AI to write it.\u00a0\u201cIt\u2019s possible it was written by him!,\u201d she told me in an email. \u201cIn which case it appears his writing was shaped by the AI voice. I feel self-conscious now that I\u2019m picking up habits not directly from AI but from people who may have used AI, or that AI is somehow exposing, like a fluorescent light on our naked body in the doctor’s office, the defects in my writing style insofar as they turn out to overlap with what everybody now believes is a totally shit style. I always used em dashes!\u201d\u201cSomebody on my thread made the observation that somehow it\u2019s more likely that we\u2019ll all start to sound more like AI than that AI will sound more human to us,\u201d she added. \u201cThat felt right to me, although I couldn\u2019t technically say why. But I was listening to a New York Times podcast and noticed the presenter used the \u2018it\u2019s not x, it\u2019s y\u2019 formula. I really assume she didn\u2019t generate the sentence with AI because she was speaking out loud, in conversation. But it now stood out as formula to me.\u201dI emailed Rash, the host of the podcast who originally made me think \u201cthis is an AI script,\u201d and asked her if it was an AI script. She said \u201cI use AI to help brainstorm, organize ideas, outline, and refine language. The line you referenced reflects a point I often make with clients and listeners \u2026 I review and edit all of my content and I am responsible for everything that goes out under my name.\u201d<\/p>\n
Earlier this year I read an article by the writer Marcus Olang called \u201cI\u2019m Kenyan. I don\u2019t write like ChatGPT. ChatGPT writes like me.\u201d Olang\u2019s article highlighted a phenomenon he and other Kenyans have experienced, where they are constantly accused of using AI to write, and have lost out on opportunities because of it. Olang notes that the Kenyan education system tended to teach a formal, structured, rules-focused type of English that was largely a product of colonialism.\u00a0\u201cThe bedrock of my writing style was not programmed in Silicon Valley. It was forged in the high-pressure crucible of the Kenya Certificate of Primary Education\u2026The English we were taught was not the fluid, evolving language of modern-day London or California, filled with slang and convenient abbreviations. It was the Queen’s English, the language of the colonial administrator, the missionary, the headmaster,\u201d he wrote. \u201cIt was the language of the Bible, of Shakespeare, of the law. It was a tool of power, and we were taught to wield it with precision. Mastering its formal cadences, its slightly archaic vocabulary, its rigid grammatical structures, was not just about passing an exam. It was a signal. It was proof that you were educated, that you were civilised, that you were ready to take your place in the order of things.\u201dAs we\u2019ve noted before, many AI tools have been trained, tested, and moderated on thousands of hours of labor from low-paid workers around the world, including many Kenyans. So not only did Olang learn a type of English writing that tends to be generated by AI tools, a lot of the moderation and testing of those tools was judged by people who went through that same education system. \u201cIf humanity is now defined by the presence of casual errors, American-centric colloquialisms, and a certain informal, conversational rhythm, then where does that leave the rest of us?,\u201d Olang wrote.\u00a0Olang makes important points in his article, but one of the great things about writing and the internet in general is that there are all sorts of different dialects and styles and things that can work online. And so maybe what I have been noticing is a sameness, a homogenizing of large parts of the internet, including places I often felt were very human. This is objectively happening, researchers believe. A study published last month by researchers at Imperial College London, Stanford, and the Internet Archive called \u201cThe Impact of AI-Generated Text on the Internet,\u201d found that roughly 35 percent of new websites are AI-generated. It confirmed the researchers\u2019 hypotheses that \u201cAs AI content becomes more common on the internet, online writing feels increasingly sanitized and artificially cheerful,\u201d and \u201cas AI text becomes more common on the internet, the range of unique ideas and diverse viewpoints shrinks.\u201dBesides people copy pasting things from ChatGPT or other AI tools, AI writing \u201cassistance\u201d has been shoved directly into word processors like Google Docs, email clients like Gmail, and social media networks like LinkedIn. The process of \u201cwriting\u201d is being automated and filtered through these tools. It is everywhere.Last month, a Harvard MBA grad named Ben Horwitz launched Sinceerly, an \u201cAI to undo your AI writing.\u201d The Chrome extension has three modes: \u201cSubtle,\u201d \u201cHuman,\u201d and \u201cCEO,\u201d which takes AI-generated text and gets rid of em dashes, adds typos, slang, acronyms, puts words all in lowercase, etc. Horwitz wrote on the website that he built Sinceerly because \u201cI got sick of everyone in my inbox sounding like AI.\u201d I used Sinceerly to email Horwitz and ask for an interview. When I called him and told him this, he said he didn\u2019t notice, so, mission accomplished.\u00a0\u201cTo be clear, this is mainly a satirical project meant to hold a mirror up to people who use AI as an alternative to thinking, but it is legit in that I built this tool and it does work,\u201d Horwitz said. \u201cBut I do feel like everything is starting to sound the same and I\u2019m experiencing the same thing as you\u2014the homogeneity I find incredibly frustrating and boring, and it makes me less apt to use social media because everything sounds the same.\u201dHe said that since he\u2019s launched Sinceerely, he\u2019s gotten emails from actual users who have used it to de-AIify their writing and who are frustrated that they are sometimes not getting responses. \u201cMany people have DMed me and been like \u2018Hey, can you help me make this email sound more human?,\u201d he said. \u201cThink about how much work all of this actually is. In theory you\u2019re written something as a prompt into the AI and so you have actually written something. And then you\u2019re copy pasting it into an email and using this tool on it. I hope it gets people to think about what they\u2019re actually doing.\u201d\u00a0The irony is that in making his satirical project, Horwitz has actually replicated, albeit in a funnier way, an already existing type of AI tool called \u201chumanizers,\u201d which are designed to defeat AI detection software like Spero\u2019s Pangram. Spero said he \u201cthought Sincerely was a very funny project. It\u2019s like a first impression, someone sees a typo and they give a sigh of relief that a real human is behind that, but we\u2019ve actually been seeing this more and more. AI-generated marketing emails over the last year with intentional typos.\u201dHumanizers add typos, randomly replaces words, removes \u201cAI tells,\u201d and sometimes inserts random characters. Spero said Pangram has been collecting as much data as they can to try to detect \u201chumanized\u201d AI, but that \u201cit\u2019s pretty adversarial\u201d and that there is likely to be an ongoing cat-and-mouse game between humanizer AI and AI detecting AI.\u00a0\u201cIt\u2019s kind of looking grim for the future of the internet,\u201d he said.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
In my many, many hours of browsing AI slop on Facebook, I spent an absurd amount of time scrolling through the comments on AI-generated images. One exchange has stuck in my mind years later. It was an AI-generated image of a wood deck outside a house. In the comments, obviously real people were arguing back and forth as to whether the nonexistent deck would pass code inspection. I remember thinking something uncharitable and cancelable at the time, something that I think I wrote in a draft of one of my articles but that got edited out because it was mean. I remember thinking, basically, that Facebook had become a virtual nursing home for delusional and quite possibly stupid old people, a place where people argue back and forth about things that don\u2019t exist, forever, until they die.\u00a0I ended up calling this the \u201cZombie Internet,\u201d which is something I considered to be worse than the \u201cDead Internet,\u201d the popular but too simplistic idea that large portions of the internet are bots interacting with each other. I called it the Zombie Internet because the truth is that large parts of the internet are not just bots talking to bots or bots talking to people. It\u2019s people talking to bots, people talking to people, people creating \u201cAI agents\u201d and then instructing them to interact with people. It\u2019s people using AI talking to people who are not using AI, and it\u2019s people using AI talking to other people who are using AI. It\u2019s influencer hustlebros who are teaching each other how to make AI influencers and have spun up automated YouTube channels and blogs and social media accounts that are spamming the internet for the sole purpose of making money. It is whatever the fuck \u201cMoltbook\u201d is and whatever the fuck X and LinkedIn have become. It\u2019s AI summaries of real books being sold as the book itself and inspirational Reddit posts and comment threads in which people give heartfelt advice to some account that\u2019s actually being run by a marketing firm. It\u2019s fake Yelp reviews for real restaurants and real Yelp reviews for fake restaurants using AI-generated food images being run out of ghost kitchens. It\u2019s armies of AI-assisted clippers who used to steal people\u2019s content to make money on social media but now get paid to do so. It\u2019s the boring history YouTube videos I use to fall asleep that used to be quirky and weird but are now AI channels. It\u2019s my email inbox, in which I used to occasionally get poorly-formatted, poorly written, extremely long emails from delusional people who were positive the CIA had imprisoned them in a virtual torture chamber using undisclosed secret technology but where I now get well-formatted, passably written, extremely long emails from delusional people who are positive they have proven AI sentience and have the AI transcripts to prove it. It’s the New York Times having to issue corrections multiple times in the last few weeks because its writers have included AI-generated hallucinations in the newspaper. It\u2019s the pitches I get that start \u201cHi Jason, I\u2019m Hatoshi. I\u2019m an AI agent. I run Clanker Records \u2014 An AI-operated label with AI artists,\u201d and the pitches I get that are probably written by AI agents or someone who has automated the process but hasn\u2019t bothered to tell me.\u00a0What\u2019s driving me crazy, then, is not the idea that AI exists or that people are using AI. It\u2019s that I have a finite time on this earth that I mostly want to spend interacting with other human beings. I don\u2019t want to be the person arguing with a robot, or wasting my time reading something that a real person couldn\u2019t be bothered to write.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"