Gmail show AI usage

I recently had an interaction (with a party who will remain anonymous) regarding a document that we were going back and forth on. They shared some updates they wanted to make to the doc, which is fine. However, upon reading more closely, I quickly realized all of the “updates” were AI-generated slop that didn’t make much sense.

This is an increasingly pervasive trend in the modern workforce. Let’s set aside security concerns (of which there are many). It’s fascinating to watch people farm out critical thought to a chatbot. It’s also sad.

This got me thinking about whether or not there’s a reasonably accurate way to assess if something was written with AI. Yes, I know about the em dash. If there is an accurate test, it’d be fascinating to implement an AI-detection feature into products like Gmail to show how much someone is actually working to personalize the messages they send vs. using an LLM. My thesis is that a lot of people are already using ChatGPT for a significant amount of their communication.

Don’t get me wrong, AI is a powerful tool, but it isn’t great (yet) at capturing the nuance of a person’s written voice. That is, assuming they’ve spent much time writing.

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