You're a machine now and you didn't know it

Today I saw a post on Substack:

“Well, it turns out that I'm a machine... and I didn't know it.

The other day I wrote a micro-story for a contest. I did it in one afternoon because it was only 200 words. One hundred percent mine, from beginning to end. And out of curiosity, before sending it, I passed it through one of those AI detectors that are so fashionable.

Result: 61% generated by artificial intelligence.

I stared at the screen for a long time. How was it possible?

I don't know why something like this happens, but the consequences of this seem quite worrying to me. There are already literary contests, publishers and universities that use these detectors as if they were infallible. And they are not. They are full of false positives.

But what disturbs me the most is imagining an author who has been working on his novel for years. That he has sweated her, that he has lost nights of sleep for her, that he has put something of himself on each page. And that when he finally presents it somewhere, an algorithm decides that it is not his.

What do you think about this? Will the authors have to keep a diary so that they can see that we have written the novel?”

This makes me think a lot. What it describes is a perfect irony: we create tools to detect if a text is human, and it turns out that they do not know how to distinguish the human from the artificial. The problem is not the tool. It is that we are delegating a deeply human judgment to an algorithm that does not understand what it is measuring.

And there's something more uncomfortable underneath. If a detector cannot distinguish your writing from that of a machine, that says nothing about your writing. It says everything about how limited the detector is. But the damage is already done the moment someone with authority takes it as proof.

I'm worried about the world we're going to if the answer to "did a human write this?" It ceases to be a conversation and becomes a percentage. Because writing was always an act of faith between the writer and the reader. The day that faith is intermediated by an algorithm, something essential breaks, and it will not be easy to repair.