People Can Tell When You Use AI

To be clear, I'm not anti-AI. I think it has legitimate use cases, and I think those use cases will continue to grow as the technology improves. Even if I didn't think that, I can tell that the genie is out of the bottle, and no amount of wishing or complaining is going to get it back in.

With that said, I don't think people realize just how blatantly obvious it is when they use AI to write their text communications. I've seen countless emails, summaries, and proposals that coworkers have come to me with, proud of the thing they've made. Every time, I have to hesitantly ask, "did you write this?"

Every time, the answer is, "ChatGPT did."

It takes no effort to detect the writing patterns that LLMs use. Beyond that, the wording is frequently impersonal and canned-sounding. They frequently make mistakes and make things up. It completely takes away the human element, and at that point you might as well just be a robot.

It doesn't look professional when you use AI to write an email that would have taken you two minutes to write on your own. Trust me, people can tell the difference, and it looks way better when you send an email you've actually written yourself.