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Blink if you're human

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Blink if you're human

dynomight ·<br>Jun 2026

writing

I write every word I post on this blog myself. I can’t prove this, of course, but there’s some evidence:

This blog existed before AI could write blog posts.

If you put any of my posts into an AI-detector they will (I assume) come back squeaky clean.

And now let me add this: I, dynomight, guarantee that every word I post here is the product of me physically hitting keys with my fingers. The only exceptions would be quotes from other humans or something that’s clearly labeled as an AI output.

How is that evidence? Well, say you think I’m a low quality person and I do use AI but I’m lying and I’ve figured out how to evade AI-detectors. OK, ouch. But consider: It’s extremely likely that AI-detectors will improve in the future. (More precisely, it’s likely that future AI-detectors will be better than current AI-detectors at detecting current AI.) If I were using AI, and a future AI detector later caught me, the fact that I made the above promise would be really embarrassing.

You may be thinking that this looks gross and self-congratulatory. So I’d like to stress that the above guarantee is carefully worded. I do often use AI “for research”, just not “for writing”. (We’ll come back to that distinction.) And I don’t think there’s anything intrinsically wrong with using AI to write blog posts. I don’t do it personally, mostly because:

I like writing.

The act of writing itself helps me figure stuff out.

This is a hobby. If you start automating your own hobbies—just what the hell are you doing?

I also don’t use AI for writing because—can we just admit it?—no one wants to read AI-generated essays. Or, rather, people love reading AI-generated essays, but when they want to read one, they will ask an AI for it themselves, thank you very much.

I know the counterarguments. What does it matter where the words came from? Shouldn’t you judge them on their own merits? Maybe. That’s a legitimate way to look at things. But empirically, I think most people don’t agree.

(I also know you’re counting the em-dashes. Count away, I’m still human.)

Here’s an oddly neglected question: Take all the essays that are AI-generated or heavily AI-assisted by one person and then given to a someone else to read. In what percentage of cases does the first person disclose the AI usage? Ignore everything related to education if you want. You can even ignore emails. I suspect the answer is still Why do people care about this? Several reasons. One is proof of work. If I, a human, write eight thousand plausible-seeming words about vitamin D, that proves that I’ve put some time and effort into understanding vitamin D. That suggests giving at some weight to my opinion, even if just to best exploit the wisdom of crowds. That doesn’t work if my essay is secretly AI-generated.

And writing isn’t just cold clinical information-sharing. It’s a kind of parasocial interaction. I know “parasocial” sounds sinister, but I maintain that parasocial relationships are often a perfectly healthy way to adapt our primitive social instincts to the modern world. Anyway, good or bad, that’s part of it.

I bring this up because I’m worried that blogs are heading into a sort of lemon market. You’ve surely had the experience of reading an essay only to slowly become dismayed as you realize it was AI-written. What’s the equilibrium? I expect that some people have already cut back on reading essays, at least from non-established authors. Over time, I expect this will lead to fewer humans writing essays, further increasing the density of AI-generated content, driving more people to cut back on reading, et cetera. This is bad because blogs are good.

As that cycle turns, social norms are also changing. Cast your mind back to the old world, five years ago. At that time, if you had started a blog and posted AI-generated essays without telling anyone, I’m reasonably certain that would have been considered a dick move. (Future generations will marvel.) But today, the largest corporations appear to do that all the time. There’s incredible momentum towards an world where AI can be used anywhere, for any purpose, with no disclosure, and that’s fine.

But it is fine! At this point, trying to bully people into proactive disclosure is just a tax on honesty / consciousness / integrity. Instead, I suggest we agree that arbitrary usage is, by default, fine. Instead, let’s work at the other end: If you have chosen to impose limits on your AI usage, then state those limits publicly. If you’re human, tell me.

Obviously, this is no panacea. People can lie. But they can’t do so without taking some reputational risk, because if you use AI and lie about it, how long will your secret stay safe? No one knows because for once the unpredictability of technological change is on our side.

However. HOWEVER. I am not suggesting that we should bully writers into declaring that they are AI-free. I think...