I can now spot AI writing with a high degree of confidence from a small amount of text; though I need about three paragraphs to be sure.

I am by no means alone in this capacity, but I wonder how much of that sensitivity stems from being a writer and editor at heart, in which the “at heart” bit carries some kind of epistemic skill. Perhaps for those who don’t have text as a big part of their lives it’s much more difficult to discern whether text has a human author.

The difference that makes the difference is not just em dashes and vainglorious juxtapositions; it’s the sense of dissociation, of the text being uninhabited, of the writing being hard to read because the communication lacks the sense of scale and intent and offering that human writing conveys. (And note here that I did the juxtaposition thing - but that by itself does not mark this as AI writing).

On the bright side, I wonder if humans have the capacity to detect souls in others, by which I mean here the embodied capacity to experience the world, and for memory and foresight to be coupled with that experiential capacity.

And so maybe AI writing will prove to be an unsuspected gift, one that helps to resurrect a forgotten superpower, a form of ESP.

Maybe our rejection of AI writing will lead us to learn that words on a page themselves have some kind of inner life, or at least can, if, and only if, we offer our souls to them…