A recent New York Times quiz on distinguishing AI from human writing:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/03/09/business/ai-writing-quiz.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share
This prompted me experimenting with AI to clarify a thought.
I began with this thought that it is not AI vs humans… as the NYT quiz impies,
Of course AI is written by humans, from the birth of writing on. Its a huge library… with deep layers of access. That access is in turn mediated by humans who form a relationship with the AI and prmp it till it satisfies the writer.
I put that into ChatGPT and, finally, nearly an hour later, after 15 iterations and about 30 examples to choose from, and one or two final edits, I got to this:
Of course, AI is written by humans. It is trained on a large body of human writing. It is a library, with mysterious layers of access. Those layers are navigated by the AI in a relationship with a human who prompts it until they are satisfied with what is written.
That was fun. It also clarified for me that AI is a tool, not an artist. It is in the quality of the relationship between the AI and the human that we leads to the quality of the writing.