There’s a debate going on right now about who — or what — wrote the thing you’re reading. I’ve been in a few of these discussions online, including a recent one on LinkedIn with my friend & former colleague Christoph Pfister.
My position is simple: as a reader, I don’t particularly care.
What I care about is whether it moves me. Whether it teaches me something. Whether it was worth the time I gave it.
Reading has purposes, and they aren’t the same
I read for two fundamental reasons. To be informed, and to be entertained. I tend to do too much of the former and not enough of the latter, but that’s another topic.
But in informed mode? I find AI to be enormously useful. I consume a lot of AI-authored content and a great deal more AI-assisted content. As long as it delivers what I came for, the provenance is a minor detail that I really don’t spend any time thinking about.
No doubt the entertainment case is different - the human touch means a lot there, and I have a hard time believing that AI-driven fiction would move me the way a great writer would. Although I’m open to being surprised there too - I’ve got a few friends using Suno to make music that is quite entertaining - and meaningful.
My classroom experience
I’ve been teaching at Northeastern for a few years now, and AI-assisted writing is of course as hot a topic in a university as it is anywhere.
I’m lucky that I teach in a business curriculum. My students (mostly) understand the value of these tools, and they’re clear-eyed about the fact that future employers will almost certainly care far more about their ability to leverage AI effectively than their ability to compose elegant prose. That’s not to say writing skills don’t matter — but the ratio has shifted dramatically. I’m not certain how I’d approach this if I were teaching a topic like English, but that’s also not my problem to solve.
When I started teaching, I thought I could spot AI-written work. I didn’t necessarily penalize students for using AI for aforementioned reasons, but it factored into how I read their submissions. As I say all the time in the classroom, my job is to make sure they understand the material, not that ChatGPT or Claude does.
My confidence, however, collapsed quickly. Within a few short semesters it became all but impossible to tell, and I’d suggest I have a better eye for it than most.
For a short while, I tried AI detectors, but I found them wildly unreliable. Certainly not something I’d feel comfortable assigning a grade against, and I stopped treating their output as evidence of anything.
Watermarking changes things - somewhat
As you may have heard, just recently Anthropic began embedding an invisible watermark in text generated by Claude. This is applied at the model level, so it’s present regardless of which product the text came out of, and it survives copy-and-paste. Files get signed provenance metadata under the C2PA standard. This is driven largely by the EU AI Act’s transparency requirements, which nearly 200 companies have now signed onto, including OpenAI, Google, Meta and Microsoft.
I don’t see this as a bad thing. I use Claude heavily, and yes that includes here. The research we publish at Differential Factor is substantially enabled by Claude, and we’ve never hidden that. Just the opposite, it’s part of the value proposition.
If regulators and readers want a machine-readable signal, they should have one.
But notice what watermarking actually solves. It makes detection reliable — which is a real improvement over the guesswork we have now. It answers the how, but it doesn’t make the question matter any more than it did before.
As detection is improving, my curiosity about the label is declining. As a reader, I care about the effect, not the machinery.
Did I learn something? Was I moved? Was it worth the time I gave it?
If the answers are yes, the provenance is a footnote.
Also worth mentioning: Substack itself shipped Pangram-powered scanning last month, after CEO Chris Best published a piece arguing against what he calls “Claudefishing.” His concern is a mismatch between what a reader expects and what they get — attention invested in something with no human thought behind it. That’s certainly a valid concern for the CEO of this platform to address, especially since writers are his customers.
But I’d frame the problem a bit differently. The problem isn’t that no human wrote it. The problem is that no human thought about it. Those aren’t the same thing.
Take this post. I dictated the entirety — the position, the classroom story, the objection to detectors — and then handed the transcript to Claude to recompose, and to Gemini to help refine. More and more that’s how I’m doing my “writing”. The thinking is 100% mine. The sentences get - help. And because the watermark is applied at the point of generation, it can’t tell those two things apart. It sees text that came out of a model and marks it accordingly, which is technically accurate, but not particularly useful, at least if you’re interested in understanding what I think.
I don’t write for a living
Finally, I fully understand that this is disruptive, which forces change, and people tend to hate change, particularly when it impacts their livelihood. None of this should indicate that I don’t feel for those who make their living writing. Their fear and frustration are fully legitimate, and I’m not attempting to wave that away.
But there’s a real productivity story to be told: that AI doesn’t just speed up writing, it can also make it better. I 100% believe that to be true, and I hope this post is some small evidence of that.
Much of this current debate is transitional anxiety. In a few years, or perhaps sooner, consuming AI-generated content will be so ordinary that the question stops being interesting. We’re just living through the loudest part of this transition. Not too far down the road, I doubt many will care.
And great human writers will survive - and thrive. The best will be even more productive. Of that, I’m quite certain. It’s not a matter of if, it’s when.
I’d love to hear where you land on this. Even if you disagree. Especially if you do.
More AI Purity test theatre