The 100,000 whys of AI

One of the most painful arguments I keep having with fellow techies is the question of whether you can distinguish between human-written and AI-generated text.Their skepticism is rooted in reason: at their core, LLMs are state-of-the-art statistical models of how humans talk. If so, the output from the model should be almost by definition indistinguishable from human language under any statistical test.I don’t think this is always argued in good faith; at least some of the debates are started by folks who wish to maintain deniability for their own underhanded use of the tech. But if you sincerely hold this belief, I present you the following collage:The image shows about 150 Amazon book covers that appear if you search the site for “100000 whys” (link). Some of these books are category bestsellers in children literature. You can view a zoomable, full-resolution version here.There’s nothing inhuman about any of these titles or covers. At the same time, I probably don’t need to convince…