The Solution is Clear as Glass

By Gordon Hopkins As the mad rush to replace people with AI (Artificial Intelligence) continues unabated, those people who still want or expect things to be done by something with a living blood supply are struggling to find ways to ensure they aren’t fooled by machines. It is a war of attrition, and those of us made of meat are losing hard to our mechanized opponents.We all know about the teachers trying to figure out how to catch those students too lazy to do homework. It isn’t just them, though. Despite some high-profile disasters, too many attorneys are still using AI to write briefs. The content on social media is more AI-generated than human-generatedAnd then there are the publishers. Book publishers, magazines, academic journals and, yes, even newspapers, are being swamped with AI-generated submissions.What can people do? The whole point of AI is to fool people. How can anyone be sure what they are reading or watching or looking at is not AI? The obvious solution is AI detectors. The morass of AI-generated swill flooding the internet and the need to separate the wheat from the chaff (Yes, I know I am mixing my metaphors) has created a new cottage industry: AI detection. There are numerous AI detectors available, some promising a 99 percent accuracy rate.A perfect solution. Well, nearly perfect. It turns out, AI detectors have one minor flaw: they don’t work.Or more accurately, they do work, until they don’t anymore.AI simply evolves too fast for AI detectors to keep up. Like any other kind of fraud, the villain behind AI fraud (the AI itself) continually modifies its modus operandi, thus evading detection. Whatever identifying factors AI detectors use to spot an AI are quickly changed by AI, becoming useless.So, what is the solution? How can you be 100 percent certain that the human behind a story or book or essay really wrote it? There is only one way. The man who showed us the way was a famous writer named Harlan Ellison. He was famous for other reasons, too. He marched with Martin Luter King in Selma, Alabama. He sued James Cameron (Cameron settled out of court). He once mailed a dead gopher to a publisher. And he was also a famous Luddite. To his dying day, he refused to write on a computer, instead preferring his expansive collection of Olympia typewriters. Harlan Ellison was also famous for writing some of his stories in the windows of bookshops. Ellison would take one of his beloved Olympia portables to a bookshop and write in the window, with onlookers gawking at him like he was a Christmas display in the window at Macy’s. As the work progressed, he would tape the pages in the window so onlookers could read them as he wrote.It was a stunt, of course, but it showed us the way. Writers may all have to start writing in windows for everyone to see if they want their readers to be sure they are the real authors of what they create, and not a machine.

Jane Elizabeth (Ruhnke) Nider

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