This cartoon was partly inspired by the whiplash approach to AI writing at LinkedIn. A few years ago, they indiscriminately pushed AI tools, offering to draft a full post after typing just 30 words.
Surprise, surprise, this resulted in a lot of AI slop on the platform. A recent study from Pangram Labs claims that 41% of long-form posts on LinkedIn were entirely AI-generated, the highest share of any social network.
Last week, Patrick Coffee in the WSJ chronicled LinkedIn’s attempts to course-correct, including retiring their “enhance your post” tool and adding a “seems like AI slop” reporting button.
We’ve swung from seeing “write with AI” pushed in just about every empty text field to “AI” becoming a new scarlet letter in writing.
In related news, Anthropic announced that Claude would start watermarking AI text in response to new EU regulation, whether the writing was written whole-cloth or even just proofed by AI.
As Shelly Palmer observed:
“We might as well just call this ‘False Positives for Everyone.'”
This coincides with a wider witch hunt to root out AI in writing, including calling out writers for errant em-dashes and other “AI tells.”
In turn, writers have responded by deliberately inserting typos and using AI tools marketed to help other AI tools sound 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 a few related cartoons I’ve drawn over the years:
