When AI Outwrites You: The Surprising Future of Creativity Unveiled

Oh So Clear

Remember CAPTCHA? Yeah, those annoying quizzes where you had to prove you were not a bot. First, it was about squinting hard at what looked like a submarine license plate warped by your water-filled diving goggles. Then it was about clicking all the photos with cars, traffic lights, or donkeys. Soon you’ll probably have to hand in a fingerprint, an iris scan, and a blood sample.

Whatever the method, the goal is always the same: trying to determine whether you’re human.

And you know what? Good writing used to be CAPTCHA too. An excellent one, in fact.

If the words sounded good, it was a human. If it sounded weird, it was a spam bot. For several decades, that filter worked surprisingly well.

And then AI showed up and barfed in everyone’s oatmeal. The result? Spam tactics have now seemingly become everyone’s default: bombard every human-detection filter out there with cheaply generated content and something will slip through.

That’s how social media, blogging platforms, and even your auntie’s candle-making Facebook group were inundated with AI slop.

So readers had no choice but to become spam filters themselves. And website bouncers too.

You see, in ancient times (roughly 4 years ago), websites had bouncers whose job it was to stop each visitor and say “prove you’re not a machine or I won’t let you in.”

But in this new age of content-spewing AI, things have funnily reversed. It’s the visitors now who are saying: “prove to me this wasn’t generated by a machine or I won’t go in.”

The pink eye incident

I’ve been a father for approximately 73 days 13 hours and 46 minutes. And this week, on day 66, 8 hours and 17 minutes in, I took one look at my baby girl and thought “Why does she look like she lost a bar fight?”

So I opened a chatbot and asked “What should I do if my baby has a pink eye?”

The bot gave me a perfect answer. A calm, clear, well-structured, perfect answer. And completely useless for actually making a decision.