We’re already waist-deep in slop, but the garbage water just keeps rising.
Human writing is, possibly for the first time in more than 5,000 years, facing a genuine threat. In less than a half-decade, generative AI has brought a Gutenberg-sized blow to the way that people write, read and even talk. Distinct voices are merging together into a kind of gray slurry: plodding and stodgy, phony and desperate.
Universal ethical standards have yet to be settled. In the classroom or a newsroom, undisclosed AI writing might result in a flunking or a firing. In the boardroom, failure to use AI in your writing could get you in trouble. Hypocrisy abounds. Some who once righteously decried plagiarism now happily take credit for words they never wrote. Professors who punish students for cheating with AI writing now quietly submit op-eds using AI.
Generative AI hit the mainstream over three years ago, but it’s just in the past year that the amount of AI-generated writing on some areas of the internet risks surpassing the amount written by humans. To really understand the ethics of AI writing, we had to understand how it was being used — and how pervasive it had become. So we put Spokane to the test: shoveling roughly a million words of op-eds, newspaper articles, campaign questionnaires and press releases into Pangram’s maw.
The results were startling.
First, our methodology
Daniel Walters
Read columns? You're probably consuming AI-generated content.
Daniel Walters
Politicians are getting in on it, too
Daniel Walters
How does RANGE feel about AI?
Glad you asked. This series pushed us to move past internal norms to developing and publishing a formal policy. Read it below.
Valerie Osier
Coming Soon...
We're not done asking people for the deets on how they're using AI. Stay tuned for stories on how activists, local journalists and government employees utilize (or don't) AI.