Writing
Everyone's a Ringer to Somebody
I played beer-league hockey for fifteen straight years, the kind with a checking ban and a roster that runs from former juniors to guys who learned to skate at thirty (me!), and I’ve noticed a tic in how everyone in it thinks, myself included. Whoever is better than you is a ringer. Not “better.” A ringer. A guy who doesn’t belong down here with us honest players, who’s slumming, who ought to be playing up a division and is padding his stats against us gentlemen of the game. The actual skill of the league has nothing to do with the judgment. You run the same math in the top tier and the bottom: draw the line at your own ability and call everyone above it a cheat. I suspect you probably don’t escape this issue until you truly graduate to the professional ranks, where incentives flip and you actually want to move up leagues.
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Fifty Percent of What?
When critics noticed that a Fortune journalist named Nick Lichtenberg was publishing more articles in six months than his colleagues managed in a year, and that an AI model was doing a lot of the producing, the magazine’s leadership offered a defense that has stuck with me: “More than 50% is Nick.” It was meant to reassure. It did the opposite, and not for the reason everyone assumed.
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The Tells Were Mine First
I built a machine that detects AI writing, and the first thing it did, given enough rope, was call me a robot.
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What AI Polish Does to Hunter S. Thompson
I know, it’s probably blasphemy to even mention AI writing in the same sentence as Hunter S. Thompson, but let’s run with it. An AI humanizer applied to his actual writing would have butchered him. The gonzo is the signature. The mangled syntax, the staccato outbursts, the way a sentence pivots mid-thought into something disreputable — those are not flaws an editor needs to clean up. They are the prose. Polish those out and you have not produced Thompson. You have produced a competent stranger’s version of Thompson, which is to say: an unremarkable column. And that doesn’t begin to address the struggles AI would have with nakedly promoting inhuman amounts of illicit drug use.
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