A popular Medium piece claims these words make it obvious you used ChatGPT: however, indeed, moreover, etc. However, I must object. Wasn’t OpenAI’s child trained on human-written content? Indeed, one must write clickbait articles to succeed on Medium, and sharing your opinions on the infamous chatbot guarantees you get the attention and interaction needed to monetize your published work (at the time of writing, the article in question had 15000 claps and 600 comments). But can you really tell if a sentence or text was written by AI? Here’s a simple example:
I love writing.
The truth, of course, is that these three simple words could be written by AI and a human. As Stanley Fish puts in his book How to Write a Sentence:
Alone, a word is just a word, a part of speech clustered in a category; it looks over at other words it would like to have a relationship with (it’s almost a dating situation) but has no way of connecting with them. And then a verb shows up, providing a way of linking up noun to adjective, and suddenly you have a sentence, a proposition, a little world. “Beautiful Joan sighed.” “John was angry.” “I am proud.” “Crucial decisions await.” And on and on forever.
Then he adds:
It is important to understand that the relationships that form the sinews and relays of sentences are limited. There is the person or thing performing an action, there is the action being performed, and there is the recipient or object of the action. That’s the basic logical structure of many sentences: X does Y to Z. (Sentences can also come without objects, as in “Joe walks.”) “Simon bought the car.” “The government raised taxes.” “The corporation gives bonuses.” … The instances are infinite, although the form remains the same: doer, doing, done to.
He concludes with this poem by Kenneth Koch:
One day the Nouns were clustered in the street.
An Adjective walked by, with her dark beauty
The Nouns were struck, moved, changed.
The next day a Verb drove up, and created the Sentence.
Complement How to Write a Sentence with George Orwell on the four reasons why I write, Jack Kerouac’s 30 rules of writing, and Stephen King who said, “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”
I’m a freelance writer with 6 years of experience in SEO blogging and article publishing. I currently run two websites: MindfulSpot.com and OurReadingLife.com. While you’re here, get the latest updates by subscribing to my newsletter.
