“No AI” Statements Are Much More Than Mere Statements – James Zhan in real life.

“No AI” Statements Are Much More Than Mere Statements

21 Jul, 2026

I came across orchids’ post sharing their conflicted feelings on whether or not “No AI” statements are genuinely necessary, helpful and/or useful. In their post, orchids argues that

the onus is on the viewer/reader to distinguish human-created content from AI-generated one;

it can be an indication of questionable quality of your work if it leads the viewer/reader to believe it was AI-generated, and

as long as your voice and style are embedded in your works, it’s already enough (at least this is my interpretation of the final paragraph of their post).

I strongly disagree with most of the post, and I think the post missed some important considerations. I believe that, now more than ever, it’s necessary and useful to label your human-made content as such because AI’s ability to replicate the final results of human work will only improve over time.

-toc-

“Made by human” statements have been around since before AI<br>Fancy handmade kitchenware is labeled “Handmade in [country]”; mom-and-pop bakeries label their breads “Homemade”; indie games and animated series make explicit statements that all the art was hand-drawn.

There’s a reason why the act of making such statements well predates the rise of AI as you simply cannot rely on the other side—be it the consumer, the viewer or the reader—to have the “skills” to tell what’s made by human vs machine (now AI too).

Just as machines have been able to create physical products that rival or surpass handcrafted ones, AI can already create content—audio, video and text—that, in many aspects, rivals human-made one. You may argue that you can tell when the text was AI-generated, but that’s now; what about the future, as AI gets better and better? Even right now in 2026, I’m not convinced anyone can consistently distinguish what’s written by AI and what’s not. The line is even blurrier when the content is part-AI, part-human (often called “AI-assisted”). The r/isthisAI subreddit has millions of weekly visitors because it’s harder and harder to spot AI-generated content.

You’re never expected to be able to tell handmade ceramics from machine-made ones, so why should anyone be expected to be able to tell human-made content from AI-generated ones?

There was a time when people automatically assumed a body of text was AI-generated when they see the use of em dashes. For me as someone who loves using the em dash, that was an infuriating trend that simply led to many false positives and frustrated writers.

I’ve had my comments on Reddit labeled as written by ChatGPT just because they were well-written and -formatted. I’ve put my writings in AI detectors before and it would come back saying it’s “80% written by AI.”

I also recently came across this comment on a Reddit thread discussing some audio software:

“at this point i just assume unless the creator is screaming from the rooftops "I HAND CODED THIS" its vibe coded.”

u/Rude-Armadillo-6963

View original Reddit screenshot

It’s clear that viewers are terrible at detecting AI-generated content and some have even assumed a “generated by AI unless declared otherwise” position. I don’t blame them as the tell-tale signs of AI constantly change and dwindle—how can we expect our audience to keep up with that?

It’s never about quality, voice and/or style<br>This paragraph that orchids wrote in their post saddens me:

If someone thinks my work is LLM-generated, then my work is probably shit and doesn't have a distinct voice. It's boring. And it might as well be AI because the difference doesn't really matter at the end of the day.

I think it’s highly problematic to believe that one’s work “might as well be AI” if it’s of low quality (but how is “quality” even defined?), lacks a distinct voice and/or boring.

Academic articles and dissertations can be dry and boring to most; a user guide of a piece of software can lack a distinct voice; and an essay written by a high school student may be low-quality—but I can appreciate them all the same when they were fully written by people, not AI.

Not all works need to be interesting or to have a voice. Technical writing is an example where you often do not want those qualities, and it’s a field of study that some people go to school for to specifically develop skills to write in technical contexts.

The truth is that people still value handmade items and homemade foods that can easily be machine-made not because they’re better (though sometimes they are), but because we know someone—or multiple people—put in the time, energy and effort to create it. I argue that it’s exactly the same reason why many people yearn for text written by human and “hand-coded” apps rather than vibe coded ones.

A blog post fully written by a blogger may have typos, grammatical errors and incoherent paragraphs, but maybe that’s because the blogger isn’t good at...