Who Wrote This?

In 2023, a New York lawyer named Steven Schwartz submitted a legal brief full of court cases that did not exist. ChatGPT had invented them, and when he asked whether they were real, it said yes. The judge fined him and his firm $5,000 (Mata v. Avianca).
What are you reading now? One of you might think that it is AI-generated content. If it is, how can we prove this notion into practical analysis? In 2023, OpenAI launched its own AI-text detector and withdrew it within months because it was unreliable. It caught only about 26% of AI-written text and wrongly flagged about 9% of human writing. Stanford researchers also found that popular detectors flagged more than half of essays by non-native English speakers as AI-generated. Today millions of people write on a daily basis, from little messages to emails, from one piece of writing to some extent a book and a heavy report. When I was writing this I kept pondering the idea: will this justify my premise that I may write something without thinking about AI at all? AI has become part of everyone who uses technology, from backwards countries to the most advanced countries, everyone is being used by AI. Rather than saying that people use AI, de facto the usage of AI in South Asia is growing more rapidly compared to European countries and the USA. In many areas of the world, writing has become so free, one can write without being paid but still feel rich in English or any native language because it gives a sense of identity.
Back before 2010, writers were hard to be labeled because it was a tough job to do. Everything written before was due to tense, whether quality-based or rubbish. You see, in mean times, anyone can produce a knee-size piece of writing without reflection. In 2023, CNET quietly published dozens of finance articles written by AI, and errors were later found in many of them, including a basic mistake about how compound interest works. The same year, Sports Illustrated was accused of publishing articles under invented author names with AI-generated headshots. The nugatory sense is being praised without the essence of individual value. Words have become shallow without original thoughts, and daily produced content is heading down day by day into a pseudo-sense of communication.
The crises of writing is not grammatical. Seeking help from AI for editing minor fixations is not weakness. To some extent, how fearlessly we are producing language without thought, that’s the problem where I get anxious. You see a bunch of organized words without organized thinking where one can enjoy reading. The whole aspect of language has become X and Y, the same rhythm or patterns moving and circling into newspapers, files, and now certain speakers remember AI-generated speeches and then sing like singers. A 2024 study of biomedical abstracts found that after ChatGPT arrived, words like “delves” and “showcasing” suddenly surged in scientific papers, and at least one in ten abstracts showed signs of language-model use. To be honest, a heading number of writers are emerging but the voice has become solo. Even paraphrasing has become part of an intellectual illusion.
The flood is already measurable. In 2023, the science-fiction magazine Clarkesworld had to close submissions after being buried under machine-made stories, and Amazon limited self-publishers to three new titles per day because of AI-generated books. In the meantime I feel exhausted to write. My subjective experience always inclines me to hear why I am writing, and to ask myself: can AI write better than a human? The 2023 Hollywood writers’ strike showed I am not alone. The Writers Guild fought partly over whether studios could use AI to generate scripts and hand writers the leftovers as “rewrites.” Serious reading requires raw imagination, tense, even disorganized content as well. Thus, we are creating a lot of content which is less likely to get read. The internet has become itself a new earth where words are dancing without any melody. We see and skip the write-up because it prolongs our boredom, as we are already in boredom.
All important ideas are not swift, they require a slow pace. When I was writing this, it took me 7 days to finish this article. I admit AI might have generated this content within seconds, better than this, but I feel pride in it. Now, you who have reached this line, let me ask you honestly: how much of what you wrote this week was really yours? The email, the caption, the reply to a friend’s grief: did you write it, or did you only approve it? To be honest, approval is not authorship. You see, clicking “generate” and then “send” does not make one a writer, it makes one a courier of someone else’s sentences. If a machine can speak on your behalf without anyone noticing the difference, then maybe the difference was never there, and that is the real offence, not mine.
We are proud of being informed, but information is cheap and thinking is expensive, and most of us are living on credit. Nobody is asking you to write beautifully. Write badly, write slowly, write with crooked sentences and a mind that is truly yours. Let the reader smell the struggle. Struggle is the only watermark no detector can fake.
So close this page and write one paragraph, without AI, without a template, without waiting for the perfect thought to arrive. If you cannot, do not blame the machine. It only exposed what was already empty. And if you can, congratulations: you have just proved that the crisis was never in writing, but in us.