The AI Detection Arms Race Is On
AI's siren song goes like this: It doesn't have to be this way . And when you think of the billions of people outside the elite group of writers who are suffering, you start to think: Maybe it doesn't have to be this way .
May Habib spent her childhood in Lebanon before moving to Canada , where she learned English as a second language. "I think it's unfair that anyone who can read and write well gets so many advantages," he said. In 2020, he founded Writer, one of many hybrid platforms designed not to replace human writing, but to help people (and specifically brands) better collaborate with AI.
Habib says he believes looking at the blank page is beneficial. It helps you consider and discard ideas and forces you to organize your thoughts. "Going through these rounds, scratching your head and looking at the scoreboard and wanting to kill yourself can be very beneficial," he said. "But that has to be compared to millisecond speeds."
A writer's goal isn't to write for you, he says, but to make your writing faster, stronger, and more consistent. This may mean suggesting changes to the prose and structure, or highlighting what has been written on the topic and providing counterarguments. The goal, he says, is to help users focus less on sentence-level mechanics and more on the ideas they want to communicate. Ideally, this process produces a piece of text that is as "human" as if a human had written it in its entirety. "If the detector can flag it as an AI record, then you've abused the tool," he said.
Ethan Malik, a professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, says the black-and-white notion that writing is created by humans or artificial intelligence is disappearing. Instead, we're entering an era he calls "centurian writing." Of course, asking ChatGPT to write an essay on the history of the Mongol Empire would yield predictable AI-style results, he said. But "began to write: "The description of the third paragraph is not quite correct; Add that information and make the tone more like The New Yorker ," he said. - So, it's a hybrid job, and the quality of the writing is much better."
Mollick, who teaches entrepreneurship at Wharton, not only allows his students to use AI tools, but requires them. "Right now, my curriculum says you have to do at least one impossible task," he said. If the student doesn't know how to code, maybe write a program that works. If you have never designed before, you can create a visual prototype. "Every piece of work you submit should be critiqued by at least four famous businessmen you copy," he said.
According to Malik, students still need to master their subject to do well. Their goal is to think critically and creatively: "I don't care what tools they use to do it, what matters is that they use them well and use their minds."
Malik admits that chatgpt is not as good as the best human authors. But it may help others. "If you were a writer who was in the bottom quartile, now you're in the 60th or 70th percentile," he said. It also frees certain types of thinkers from the tyranny of the writing process. "We tend to equate writing ability with intelligence, but that's not always the case," he says. "Actually, I think that's often not true."
