Stop Trying to Distinguish AI-Generated Writing From Human Writing Because You Can’t

I was just attending a virtual academic conference, where, frustratingly and annoyingly, 9 out of 10 sessions were about AI. But then, in one of the sessions that discussed human writing vs AI writing, I saw this slide: Human Writing (good) Machine Writing (or bad human writing) Idiosyncratic Cliched Circumlocutory Direct (in an obvious way) “Messy” Smooth and superficial Subtle (e.g. flip-flops mentioned once, in passing) Predictable Surprising Literal (“MUST WRITE ABOUT FLIP FLOPS”) Effortful for author and reader alike Easy for author and reader alike Fucking excuse me? This is so misleading and inaccurate on so many levels. For context, this session referenced a literary experiment held on The New York Times by an author to compare a section of fiction written by human (the author herself) vs generated by AI. At the conference, the session presenter—a university prof—asked their students to reflect on the experiment, and together they came up with the above “tells” of human…