I am an art director who was asked to write an op-ed. I am the picture person, they tell me, but I have always loved to write, and I think I do it pretty well, you know for a picture person. Why am I telling you this, well like I said I was asked to write an op-ed which I did.
Delano Chengan
I thought about every detail, I researched, I googled synonyms and better phrases to use, I read a few articles that aligned with my thinking and then I wrote and refined and wrote and refined and wrote and refined.
Once I was happy with that I uploaded the text into AI and asked it to craft it, spell-check it and check the grammar. Once that was done I gave it a once-over and was very happy with the result. I send it to a colleague who then asked a very simple and honest question, a fair one, but one that hit me full on in the chest – did you use AI to write this?
The answer was of course yes, why would I not use the most powerful tool I have at my disposal? Why would I not use this miracle of technology to sharpen my writing and to articulate my thoughts in a clearer way.
That’s the moment doubt crept in, well how much of this is my voice actually I thought, and how much of it have I given up, handed over to AI to take charge? Did I even write any of this? I am an art director, nobody is going to believe I wrote this. I should have been a bit messier, not so polished, maybe that would have done the trick.
After a brief meltdown I knew what I had to do, I had to prove my colleague wrong. So I found an online ai detector, uploaded the op-ed and asked it to check whether AI had written it. It came back saying that most of the text is human, and that a small percentage was most likely written by AI. That made me feel so much better… for a while and then, doubt.
Let me just try a few other ai detectors just to make sure, surely they will all say the same thing. Lol. What I didn’t expect was the mixed bag of extremes hardly any of the results matched the first test, some said 0 percent ai was detected and other said that the op-ed was fully generated by AI.
So who wrote it and how could truly find out?
To get the answers, I had to turn to someone that I knew had literally all the answers, someone that I could tell all my doubts, all my fears about sending this op-ed out into the world to, who would give me solid solutions on how to fix it. Naturally, I turned to AI.
And my instinct was correct because it told me something so profound that I can’t stop thinking about, it told me that we have landed in a place where competence itself is suspicious.
Now isn’t that interesting?
Most of these op-eds will end with some kind of rallying cry or call to action, most will leave you inspired. I am afraid this one will probably leave you with more questions than answers.
This is not the original op-ed I wrote, I chose to pull that one and submit this one instead. No ai, no spell check, no proofreader, no interrogation or rewrites – straight from my brain to the page, which is not how writing works at all, but at least nobody will ask: is this AI?
…And yes, AI said I did a great job.
