We need some kind of organized code to signal our humanity to other writers and content creators. Something akin to Pig Latin, trucking ten codes, or ham radio. Something to show other humans that we’re not using AI.

We could make mistakes on purpose.

To err is human. Right? Throw in some run-on sentences, confuse they’re/their. Then we can prove AI didn’t write it.

Ri-i-ighht.

Before ChatGPT ever exploded on the scene, I had a theory about the AI takeover that turned out to be partly true.

I imagined all of us human writers and content creators, huddled together on some corner of the internet, trying to prove our humanity to each other.

How?

Through purposeful mistakes. Even the great writers would do it.

Editors would be in on it, too (though it would probably just about kill them, or at least make them itchy and irritable).

But we’d pull together. We’d make it work.

Stay human, stay flawed. That’s the message we’d share, our act of rebellion.

The trouble, of course, is that AI itself also makes mistakes, in both content and syntax.

As an experiment, I asked Claude and Gemini to add errors to an article I wrote. They both complied, quite happily (or so I imagined). I guess even machines can play dumb.

Turns out, to err is both human and machine.

Any other ideas?