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Did AI write this newsletter?

As AI detectors flag human prose, the real question may be less about who wrote it and more about whether the writing is any good

John Ricky/Anadolu via Getty Images

A version of this article originally appeared in Quartz’s AI & Tech newsletter. Sign up here to get the latest AI & tech news, analysis and insights straight to your inbox.

Do you think AI wrote this?

What if I — for the sake of argument — threw in a couple of em-dashes? 

Or if I said it wasn’t AI writing, it was something else.

The witch hunt for AI writing is a new favorite pastime on social media. Tweets, LinkedIn posts, books, articles and even Instagram posts are all up to be questioned. Write too tidy a sentence, use a certain turn of phrase, sprinkle in one em-dash too many and someone will inevitably declare that they know what really happened.

AI tools claiming to spot AI writing are behind many of these investigations. Pangram, a company that claims its AI-writing detector produces a false positive only about once in every 10,000 checks, is one of the most popular. That statistic sounds close to certainty, though critics have questioned what happens........

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