This cartoon was inspired in part by the whiplash approach to AI writing on LinkedIn. A few years ago, they indiscriminately pushed AI tools and offered to write an entire post after writing just 30 words.
Surprise, surprise, this resulted in a lot of AI on the platform. A recent study from Pangram Labs states that 41% of long-form posts on LinkedIn were generated entirely by AI, the highest proportion of any social network.
Last week, Patrick Coffee at the WSJ chronicled LinkedIn’s attempts to correct course, including retiring its “improve your post” tool and adding a report button “seems like a waste of AI.”
We’ve gone from seeing “AI writing” in almost every empty text field to “AI” becoming a new scarlet letter in writing.
In related news, Anthropic announced that Claude would begin watermarking AI text in response to the new EU regulation, whether the writing was written in full or even just reviewed by AI.
As Shelly Palmer observed:
“We might as well call this ‘False Positives for Everyone.'”
This coincides with a broader witch hunt to eradicate AI in writing, which includes calling out writers for errant scripts and other “AI hints.”
In turn, writers have responded by deliberately inserting typos and using AI tools marketed to help make other AI tools seem more human.
Or as I wrote in a cartoon last year:
“People respond to content that is “AUTHENTIC,” “GENUINE,” and “HUMAN.” So let’s include those words in our AI prompts.”
Here are some related cartoons I’ve drawn over the years: