The Consensus Builds a Cheap AI-Tells Detector to Flag AI-Written Articles
Has AI Tells
The Consensus, a site promoting good technical writing, has built a static-rule AI-tells detector after readers overwhelmingly preferred even bad human writing to good AI writing. The detector doesn't claim an article is AI-written; it flags pieces that remind you of AI prose. Articles in the 99th percentile are excluded from the daily At a Glance section, the sparkle icon, and the weekly newsletter. It's cheap, imperfect, and gameable—but that's fine, since the real problem is that AI writing all sounds the same.
Because half of the irritation is that all these AI-written article sound the same!