Dwight Silverman, whose tech column at The Houston Chronicle is ending, writes about how his departure was recognized by artificial intelligence.
Silverman writes, “All that’s true, but it has the dry, matter-of-fact voice common to AI. There’s even an em dash in that first paragraph, which some consider a “tell” that AI was used. Although, to be fair, I also use a lot of em dashes in my writing — and I am all too human.
“The story appeared shortly after I wrote my aforementioned blog post about the end of Personal Tech, as well as after a human-written business news site, Talking Biz News, took note of it. In fact, some of the wording in the Citybiz story mirrors the Talking Biz News item. The presumed AI-generated story also seems to draw from my Chronicle author page bio and my LinkedIn profile.
“I pasted the text of the story into multiple sites that purport to tell whether content is AI-generated. Nearly all said it was, and the most definitive was Google’s Gemini large language model, which declared the ‘text is almost certainly generated by AI,’ that it has a ‘Wikipedia summary tone’ and that it’s a ‘textbook example of AI writing.’
“The irony that the possible close-out of my tech journalism career has likely been chronicled by the very technology that many in my profession worry will eventually replace writers and editors is not lost on me.”
Read more here.
