What about answers that an LLM gave to a question that we ourselves asked? Should we “labor” to understand that answer?

I think the argument, as presented in this and other similar pieces of critique, is too simplistic.

I do understand the criticism, but I think it should be framed in a different manner. The problem, when we read a long form piece by an author, is that we imagine that there’s another “mind” at the other side. We imagine that we are following the reasoning within the mind of a fellow human being, the writer. There’s an implied sort of “intimacy” to it. And the breach is when we are fooled into thinking that we are engaged in human communication, only to discover that there is a machine on the other side.

When we ask questions to an AI, this problem does not exist, because we are fully aware that the entity on the other side is not a human being.

Yet there is no doubt that the reply from an AI can contain information that is very much worthy of our time, and of our “labor” and effort to understand it.

So I think this ultimately will be about disclosure. As long as we are being made aware of the percentage of AI use in a text, explicitly or implicitly, I think we will actually grow to accept it.

I (am kinda forced to) use LLM to generate maybe 40% of the code at work, that is after my review and modifications. But I pretty much wrote all of the comments by myself. I can get into the flow by writing comments.

I liked your piece, and agree with almost all of it, but I'm surprised by your faith in the accuracy of Pangram at detecting AI writing. Is your faith based on testing it with lots of writing of known origins, or are you just saying that it reaches the same conclusion that you do as a talented human?

In particular, I wondered if you have tried running all of your own writings through it to verify that it thinks you are human. I was struck by Freddie deBoer's recent piece where he did this and said it often failed: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/i-wouldnt-say-pangram-i...

What percentage of false positive rejections would you find acceptable? Would you accept this even if it forced you to change the way you write?

Where I kind of disagree is that I don't think most readers will revolt. I think the mountain of LLM slop has actually changed people's behavior in more ways than one. Some are already relying on LLMs to summarize articles: then it doesn't matter to them who wrote it, they're just consuming machine-condensed content with no way to tell if a human or an LLM wrote the original piece. Or if their summarizer hallucinated.

https://meatbag.atomic14.com/

https://www.atomic14.com/2026/08/18/detecting-claude-with-le...

It’s very hard to make reliable though. Different models have different characteristics and you can prompt your way out of being detected.

Only saying "LLM writing" is honestly lazy writing. Specifically what?

I get the glaring cases, I get the idea that if the prose is generated then maybe also the idea, I get the feeling when reading a complete LLM authored piece.

But that doesn't help the piece, because - beside those glaring cases - most writing today is a mix between authors ideas and LLM prose.

I guess there is a kind of participatory element to the discourse where, if you want an audience, there is an editing process. Whereas in other cases, we wrote these as progress notes on an unknown journey, breadcrumbs or upturned stones to mark a path to the horizon.

Maybe it's the difference between writing as a mode of discovery, retreading the mental arc of a solution, and writing something honed to leave a mark.

I wish that were true, but I fear it may not be.

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/07/canadian-legislator-reads...

Another great day where Google only gives me 2 results on the first page.