With AI unfortunately becoming more prevalent every day, it’s become incredibly easy to identify when a poster or piece of writing used AI for its creation. Identifying things like this is a talent of mine, as I have not yet been wrong in any of my assumptions, but it’s started to become something that more people are able to do.
For one: AI posters always look the same. If you’ve seen as many as I have, it’s incredibly obvious, if you haven’t, take a stroll around Perry, and you may see one or two lying around. Maybe even a giant anti-hazing poster that is just as obvious as the rest. Now the posters are the easy ones to identify: the same mismatching brush fonts, ugly textures, the token AI “art” style and things repeating. It’s become near obvious every time a poster for an event uses AI for its creation, it’s the writing that stumps most people.
After hearing enough AI Reddit stories on TikTok, I have broken down the ChatGPT speech into a formula. First off, rule of threes. AI-generated writing often breaks speech into threes. Think of “not x, not y, but z.” This pattern of speech, in particular, is a huge red flag when you’re trying to indicate AI writing. In the same realm of threes, AI like ChatGPT will just list descriptors in groups of three in general, and repeat this formula very often. Another thing that is easily noticeable is the adjectives used, they’re just odd and out of left field. One time I saw, “the coffee tasted like pain and regret,” nobody has ever said that…ever. Some other common things that give it away are short, punchy sentences, overuse of em dashes and forced “sass” or “humor” in the writing itself and specifically the phrase “and, honestly?”, I promise we can tell, or at least I can, every single time. Seriously, knock that off, it’s obvious when writing doesn’t match the tone in which someone usually speaks. We all have unique ways of talking that translate into our writing, and when it’s drastically different, and you use sentence structures and words you’ve never used before, we know.
Now, why is this issue so important to me? Why do I care so much about what other people are doing? I absolutely cannot stand when people resort to AI before consulting their peers, their professors or their brains. And just using AI before all else makes your critical thinking and creativity way worse, not to mention the horrendous environmental impacts YOU are contributing to if you ask ChatGPT how to think for you. There are so many resources out there that can help with writing or making posters. Get on Canva, go to the Writing Center, just try your best. Personally, I’d rather have non-perfect work with humanity and effort than some slop that you didn’t even bother to try on. If this article does anything for you, please let it wake you up and encourage you to try hard on things and ask for help. Trying, failing, asking for help, any of it, is way better than destroying the environment and your brain.
