Spot the Bot

We've turned into digital bloodhounds, haven't we?

There's a whole cottage industry now devoted to sniffing out machine-generated content. Writer calling out other writers for their suspicious use of em-dashes. Editors scrutinizing submissions for telltale algorithmic fingerprints. Twitter warriors playing gotcha with suspiciously polished threads.

It's become our newest parlor game: Spot the Bot.

But here's the thing that keeps me up at night: while we're all playing AI detective, the rest of the world is quietly going cyborg.

Your photographer friend? She's using AI to remove power lines from landscapes. That brilliant article you shared? The writer used an assistant to clean up their first draft. The startup founder giving that killer presentation? Half those slides were generated, then tweaked by human hands.

We're chasing ghosts in a haunted house.

The binary we're desperately trying to preserve -- human versus machine -- is dissolving faster than we can draw the lines. Soon, asking "Is this AI?" will be like asking if a song is "digital" or if a photo is "Photoshopped." The question itself will seem quaint.

Maybe the real question isn't whether something was made by AI.

Maybe it's whether it's any good.

Because in six months, when your nephew's English teacher is using AI to grade papers that were written with AI assistance, and your marketing team is using AI to optimize campaigns for an audience that's increasingly AI-curated, the whole detection game starts to feel a bit... academic.

The lines aren't just blurring. They're disappearing entirely.

And we're all complicit in their erasure, one "enhance this email" and "help me brainstorm" at a time.

Welcome to the future. Population: all of us, plus our digital co-pilots.