The day everything changed was November 30, 2022. That was when ChatGPT was unleashed upon humanity, and my daughters’ friends discovered they could get an AI to write their university essays while they sat around eating crisps and watching Love Island.
Sure, we had “AI” before then: autocorrect, spellcheck, Siri telling us to turn left when we were already halfway down the motorway. But ChatGPT was different. This wasn’t a tool. This was a very polite alien intelligence that had apparently read the entire internet and was now willing to write a 2,000-word essay on The Influence of Beowulf on Taylor Swift in about four seconds.
That was the day we poisoned the well.
The Tour de France Principle
If you’re a fan of cycling, you’ll know the Tour de France went through a rather awkward period where winner after winner turned out to be, how shall we say, “chemically enhanced.” Some titles were stripped, others left blank, and the official record now looks like someone spilled coffee on it.
Writing is now in the same situation. From this point on, we will never truly know whether something was written by a human being or by ChatGPT. Maybe that heartfelt love letter was really just a well-prompted bot. Maybe that corporate memo wasn’t carefully crafted by Martin in HR but by a silicon sidekick that never sleeps and always knows how to use semicolons.
We’ve Been Here Before
This isn’t the first time we’ve lost trust in a medium. I wrote about it a while back in an article called What is a photo. And the truth is, we were already suspicious long before Photoshop, with trick photography, staged “documentary” shots, and airbrushing, all the ways reality could be nudged. Photoshop just made it faster and cheaper.
That’s where we are with writing. Every essay, every article, every post could be pure, or it could be “enhanced.” And unlike cycling, we can’t just strip the winners and give the yellow jersey to some confused intern who definitely wrote their essay the hard way.
The Alien in the Room
The weirdest part is how this alien intelligence has started to infiltrate our actual dialogue. You can spot its fingerprints everywhere: emails that suddenly sound like legal contracts, text messages with suspiciously polished grammar, blog posts (not this one, obviously) that feel like they were written by a very polite Martian.
And here’s the kicker: even if you don’t use AI, you’re surrounded by people who do, so the rhythms seep in. Pretty soon we’ll all be unconsciously writing like bots. Which is great news if you’ve always wanted to sound like Microsoft Word with feelings.
Living with Contaminated Water
The well is poisoned. We can’t filter it. The AI-detectors don’t work. They give you results like, “This was written by a human who was maybe eating spaghetti” or “92% AI but also maybe a squirrel.”
So the real question isn’t, “Is this AI?” The question is, “How is AI being used here?” Did it write the whole thing? Did it just fix the commas? Did it add a quote from Cicero that sounds suspiciously made up?
Because we can never go back. The water in the well will never be pure again.
Final Thought
When my daughters hand me an essay now, I don’t ask, “Did you use AI?” I ask, “Okay, but how much?” And then I pour myself another coffee and try not to think too hard about it.
Because like it or not, our dialogue has been permanently infiltrated by this mysterious, alien-sounding intelligence. The best we can do is learn to swim in the poisoned water without growing extra heads.
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