Hey, so generative AI witch hunts are a bad thing, actually.

Over the weekend, The Devil Wears Prada 2 came out, which I have not seen yet, but I have seen the conversation around this image. Many people think it is generative AI because of its surreal quality, but as Elite Daily reported, it is fact real. Hi, my name is Jess and I am a social media professor, researcher, and teacher. Over the last year, we have seen a huge increase in people saying it is AI in order to invalidate truth claims or to simply dismiss bad quality writing, music, art, whatever. And that is not good, and I called it a witch hunt for a reason. Because you don't like something or agree with it, doesn't make it AI. Humans have been capable of producing slop all on their own throughout all of human history. And last fall, I made a video saying this. I think that one thing that's going to happen is that the process is going to become just as important as the creation. Being able to prove you wrote, drew, made something and didn't just use generative AI for it is going to become crucial. Which is also then what the artist who made this Meryl Streep image had to do. Two authors whose podcast I really like, Victoria Aveyard and Somi Chinani, have talked about this on their podcast extensively as well, saying that as authors, as New York Times bestselling authors, they are so afraid of being accused of using AI just because somebody doesn't like it, that they are heavily documenting their writing process. And this culture of heightened suspicion is very bad, and I also think it is related to something I talked about previously on my page relating to post-authenticity on social media. But at the end of the day, the fact of the matter is, you cannot prove something is AI unless someone has told you it is. Like the creator, not an onlooker. And I say this as someone who has to encounter inauthentic and unauthentic work every day through being a college professor, through being an editor-in-chief of an academic journal. It is my job and is being a hefty part of my job to assess whether something is authentic or not. And the tells that people think are out there are not guaranteed 100% tells, even with that wonderful drawing of Meryl Streep from the film. Just because it looked kind of surreal and uncanny, people jumped to say it was AI when it was really just an artistic style. So the tells are not guarantees. There is really only one way that I as a college professor have kind of figured out whether it's AI or not, and that's a whole other video, so let me know if you want me to talk about that. As someone very involved in online book spaces, I've also been following the Mia Ballard Shy Girl controversy in which Hachette pulled its from US publication and distribution after it came out AI was used in the work. And we now know AI was used when it was confirmed by Ballard herself that her editor, unbeknownst to Ballard, used AI to generate substantial portions of the text. The New York Times article that kind of blew this whole thing open relied heavily on kind of sourcing from a guy who made a generative AI detection software claiming he ran this through the software, and surprise, it was AI. Of course he's going to promote his own tool. It is similarly not lost on me that one of the first instances we saw of this witch hunt in publishing came for a Black woman, when James Frey is out there, you know, talking about using AI all the time in his work. Yeah, so I'm very much not here for the AI witch hunts because I think they are very much adding to this pervasive culture of distrust that we see online. And of course, yes, this is partially generative AI companies' fault for leading us to this place and making AI so pervasive. So I hate to break it to you, but no tell is 100%. Let me know what questions and comments you have down below.