Syndrome Imposter

With the increasing assistance of AI chatbots in our writing, the question of authorship has taken a rather amusing turn. "Did you write this yourself?" – a question that seems to have gained in popularity recently. It's a question that makes me wonder: what exactly constitutes "written by me" these days? I can't help but imagine a time where typewriters were replacing pens and quills, and people would ask, "Did you draw these funny letters yourself?" The parallels are intriguing. Of course, we could distinguish between the tool and the content it generates. Then again, perhaps our interpretation of authorship has undergone a transformation.

Personally, I believe the true essence lies in the core idea and the underlying message, rather than its mere output. Text may sound flawless, but isn't that a good thing? This is where it gets tricky. It's challenging to separate content from presentation, especially when we're uncertain about who the "author" is in the context of AI-generated content. When we're confronted with a text that sounds like it was penned by AI, we tend to shift our focus to the supposed author and begin to scrutinize their writing skills. It's a game of sorts, where we try to unmask the imposter.

After all, nobody is that good at writing, right? We should know, after all. We skip past the idea entirely and delve headlong into the nitty-gritty of grammar, spelling, and style. We question our alleged author, and with success: "Yes, I used a chatbot to assist me. But what do you think about the idea?", they reply. I mean, can you even take it seriously at this point? You've just uncovered the truth, and now they expect you to play along? You pause, contemplating the contradictions.

Ultimately, you decide it's best to hear it from them instead. They stumble in processing the information, presenting it less fluently, and confirm what you already suspected: they did indeed receive assistance from artificial intelligence. They've abandoned the time-consuming, error-prone human approach to writing. "Aha!" you think. You reject the idea on account of its presentation. "Next!" you declare, moving on to a poorly conceived idea crafted by a real human: "Now that's what I call writing!".

This article was proudly written with the help of ChatGPT.