Did an AI write this essay?

You may never know.

How would you tell now? Yeah, you’d look for this little boi: —. You’d look for other telling signs and signatures, certain language, certain constructions, formality, etc. But that’s only true when the generator of the AI generation is a busy person, not bothering with any further prompting or demands for refinement. When he doesn’t care for the output. If he intends to manipulate you into thinking the generated piece to be real, he will succeed. You will not be able to tell. Those AI detectors, you might think. Well, they are proven to be mostly bullshit — and they only work when the generator of the AI generated piece indeed does not bother misleading you.

There is no difference now. With some pieces, you might think you could be sure of authenticity. Perhaps you know the author and followed him a long time, perhaps you think of the piece as a particularly moving one, impossible to be artificially generated, perhaps that and that, but let me tell you: you cannot be sure. Prompt the AI with your demands, train it on former pieces, and you can fool anyone. Yes, some still deny it or don’t want to stare at the truth, but AI today is absolutely capable of that. ChatGPT and others are not where they were two years ago, though public discourse might not transfer that. It’s much further along than you probably think.

So did an AI write this essay?

The point is, you cannot be sure.

I can assure you, perhaps. I vouch with my integrity. I’ve been writing these essays for a long time now and some of you have followed me for two, three years now. You can be sure, surely, that when I started out I wrote everything myself because back then AI did not quite exist. But what about after? I can give you all the assurances I got in me, but, again, you just cannot be certain, ever now, forever now. It’s not a fad, it’s reality.

One can grow suspicious. There are lots and lots of writers here on Substack, many more yet on other platforms. I’ve been browsing Substack every now and then, and yes, one can grow suspicious very quickly. I sometimes go months without writing anything new (sorry for that, guys). There are writers that spit out long-ass essays on the daily. I’m sorry but that is not possible. There are also those writers that write the same thing over and over and over again, always the same topic, beating the ancestors of a dead horse, and, sorry, that is also not possible. One loses interest, one is not a machine, one moves on to other topics, other interests. Come on, you did not write 187 essays on the same shit. Either you’re insane or not real.

I think most “content” here is not real. It’s one of the things that held me back from writing more in recent months. What for? My thoughts are not real anymore. Why would anyone give them any attention or ascribe meaning? You can mass-produce those thoughts. You can generate them at will. Conjure them from thin fucking air, from the void itself. They are just as (un)real as human thoughts. They are beginning to form original thoughts and worthwhile stories. This is the end of human exceptionalism.

It’s only accelerating, exponentially. At the forefronts of research, the main focus of investment and opportunity. Unfathomable resources. Wars will be fought over it, I’m sure (and perhaps against it). Systems will topple, change forever, into something unrecognizable. Stop looking away because it is very real whatever you might think of it. Much like rightwing conservatives who cannot accept a definite truth such climate change, many leftwing progressives cannot accept this new truth. But that doesn’t matter.

So yeah, I wrote this here myself. But what use have you of that? Is it automatically better? A priori? If yes, then why? Because humans are somehow… magic? God made us in his likeness and we are above all other life forms? There can be no non-human thought? That is not an argument. Nothing is special or everything is, nothing is eternal. Progress is quite literally unstoppable. Someone will do it, whether you like it or not.

Step 1: enjoy a piece of art

Step 2: realize it’s not made by a human

Step 3: hate a piece of art

Understandable for now

But who are we to judge? You did not even see the difference before someone told you. What is art and where does it end? Who is to decide and on what basis? We are ghosts now. Our products can be used to deconstruct us, explain us, see that it’s all not so special, after all. The Internet is our collective soul, and that soul is being distilled into something not so much unlike us. What are we but a long succession of impressions, subjectively interpreted by our brains? Zeros and ones can build anything you could ever possibly want. They are atoms of reality. Either something is true or it is not. And from that: infinite complexity. Patterns over patterns, nothing but statistics, probabilities and decisions. Calculable if one has the time and means.

We are the only species that has ever written something down. But because we wrote it down, documented everything in every possible medium, gave it freely to the internet hive-mind, we became measurable, interpretable, replicable, perhaps even improvable.

This is coming. Not today, not next year. But it has become clear that it is coming. And somehow we will have to deal with that. Substack right now is not doing anything because it literally cannot do anything. Video is still verifiable, but text is done. It’s just a couple dozen characters in particular patterns. Sometimes they become part of something profound but mostly they do not. Text appears so very human, but it is not anymore.

Am I real to you? You’ve never seen me. You’ve seen pictures and you’ve seen my thoughts. But they are not so special, and they are reproducible and easy to imitate. Ghosts on a screen.

Antonio Melonio

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