AI disclaimers have their place
Dear reader,
415,000. That’s the number of sites that are using the Not By AI badge. When you add other ways to communicate this, the number is much higher. But not everyone agrees that this needs to be disclosed.
Since people can detect AI-generated writing, the “No AI” disclaimers are unnecessary. This is the claim that basement blog made this week, arguing that no label is going to save a writer whose text looks similar to an AI-written content:
If someone thinks my work is LLM-generated, then my work is probably shit and doesn't have a distinct voice. It's boring. And it might as well be AI because the difference doesn't really matter at the end of the day.
What the argument leaves out
The argument misses the biggest reason people choose to display these labels. It’s not so much about worrying if the writing appears AI-made; it’s a message that communicates the value of human-made content.
The post neither stops to consider the obvious: there are ways to use AI without letting it write the whole post or parts of it. People can use it to polish, structure, brainstorm, or deal with the struggles that come with writing. As a reader, this kind of use is much harder, if not impossible, to notice.
How some writers use AI
People who use AI this way often argue that the ideas are still theirs, and they only use it to speed up or refine the writing. This is misleading at best. One example of this is Arun Venkatesan’s “Ai-enhanced writing process,” where the two leading principles are not letting AI do any thinking or writing for him. Here’s how he describes this:
Without AI, I used to sit for a long time moving thoughts around, trying to figure out how everything connects.
AI tools make this much easier now. I can copy-paste the raw notes into Claude and ask for variations: “Can you structure this into a three-part story?” or “Can you arrange this chronologically?” I keep prompting and tweaking until I have an outline I like. Then I ask for a final version, making sure it doesn’t lose any of my original ideas or add any of its own. The outline is still entirely my thinking — all the LLM has done is moved things around.
Pablo Enoc published a post criticizing this process, as it was pretty obvious how it violates Venkatesan’s principles:
The moving things around is precisely what thinking and writing involves. It's where ideas are born and cultivated, shaped to become what we have in mind. The rearranging of words to capture an incipient thought is the struggle and joy of being a writer. More precisely, this restructuring process violates the second principle.
Besides this, Venkatesan uses Google’s NotebookLM to create AI podcasts to critique his writing: “About half the criticism they raise are things I wouldn’t have thought of immediately.” If this doesn’t violate his principle of not letting AI think for him, I don’t know what will.
How I use AI
I used to use AI for a few of my early blog posts. This is something I’m not proud of, even if I limited my use for polishing the text, respecting the Not By AI project’s 90% rule.
At the beginning of this year, I stopped using AI for any purpose. My rising ethical concerns and understanding the value of human-first writing led me to make this decision. I want to thank everyone who has spoken about this topic and enlightened me.
Writing without an AI assistant has made me notice how rewarding it feels to figure out the best way to structure a sentence or organize the paragraphs. Letting an AI tool do this for you takes a part of you from the finished piece. It makes your writing less human. 🌔