By Joshua Tyler
| Updated
Despite this site’s robotic name, everything we do is created by humans, for humans. It takes hours to write and publish an article like this one. At least two human people are usually involved, one to come up with a concept and write it, and another to make sure it looks good and to make sure it’s free from error. It takes even more human effort to produce our YouTube videos. Those often take as many as three people, working together nonstop for a solid week to produce a single video.
When we’re done bringing an idea to life, we humans publish whatever is that we’ve spent days sweating over, only to have the comments immediately fill up with people screaming that they hate us for using lazy AI to create content. Our fellow humans have no idea what they’re talking about.
Why People Are Paranoid About AI
People have become paranoid about AI-created slop for two reasons. The first is that there’s so much of it, and it’s so pervasive, that you have to live your life suspicious of what you’re looking at. The second is that their chosen media source has told them that AI is evil, it’s out to get them, and they should be afraid of it.
Most people don’t have their own opinions. They are assigned opinions. One recent opinion most people have been assigned is that AI is evil, and they should hate it. So they do, while at the same time using it in their daily lives for basically everything. AI use is through the roof. Humans don’t understand AI, and they also don’t understand what hypocrisy means, but that’s a topic for a different time.
Why Average Internet Users Can’t Spot AI
Unfortunately, whether people are right to hate AI-created content is irrelevant because most people are totally incapable of spotting AI when they see it. AI gets better at not looking like AI every day, while the human ability to spot AI remains static. We’re not winning this battle, my humans.
I’m extremely confident in my ability to spot AI-created articles, images, and videos. But that’s only because that is, specifically, my chosen field. I probably couldn’t spot an AI-generated legal document, because that’s not my field.
I’ve spent 25 years creating entertainment content. If I didn’t have that level of experience, there’d be no way I could spot AI attempts to mimic human entertainment journalism. None of you should feel bad if you’re duped.
How To Accurately Spot AI-Generated Content
What you can do, instead of making an educated guess and trying to destroy someone who’s creating the very human content you say you want, is step back and either say nothing or examine the things you can figure out to determine what’s what.
Our videos end with a closing credits segment where the actual human people making them are clearly named and credited. This article has my name, Joshua Tyler, emblazoned at the top and links to detailed information about me. You can look me up, and if you do, you’ll discover I’ve been writing about entertainment and technology for a long time. I don’t need my AI to do my work for me; I’m good at it and can write an article like this as fast or faster than any creatively bankrupt large-language model. So you can assume anything I’ve created is my actual idea (for better or worse).
Unless you’re either super experienced in the field in question or willing to do detailed research, you should probably shut up about AI. You don’t know what you’re talking about.
Support Humans Without Fear
Besides, in the end, none of this is going to be a problem. What the average person doesn’t understand about AI is that it has no ideas. No AI could have come up with the idea for this article on its own, because it can’t think of anything. I could have told AI I wanted it to write an op-ed about why people should stop trying to spot AI, but it would still need me at the outset, even if what it wrote was good (and it won’t be).
That means the AI slop revolution can’t last forever. Right now, it’s running on marketing hype, not actual achievement. In its final form, AI will be a content creation tool used by humans with good ideas, not a replacement for them.
I used AI as a tool to create the image at the top of this page. Midjourney made it, but I had to tell Midjourney what to make. It’s my idea, and AI was used as a tool to execute the thing I came up with in my head, just like using a pencil.
In the meantime, while the AI over-hype settles down, support the human creators that you know are human creators. But also avoid shouting “AI!” and threatening to use the block button the first time someone’s narration voice sounds slightly robotic. I probably just had a cold.
