At Microsoft, I spent a lot of the last few years thinking about AI-generated content. I designed internal and external tools using large language models and other machine learning systems. I designed user experiences, focusing on the words people read in apps for features that use AI. And, I spent a lot of time evaluating the output of AI-systems.
After leaving Microsoft, I’ve caught up a bit with some of the work going on outside of Microsoft and recently contributed to a tool by an AI researcher I follow, Simon Willison. Simon once published at least one new post every day for an entire calendar year which is an accomplishment I really admire. At my blogging prime, my goal was to publish 2 posts a month, which I was almost able to do with 200 posts in 10 years. I’ve been thinking about picking up the pace again now that I’ve left Microsoft, but haven’t set any particular goal yet.
One of Simon’s recent short posts on Bluesky caught my eye. He mentioned a tool that highlights AI-cliches. Considering my deep interest in language, software tools, and AI, the tool spoke to me. Lately, when I’ve been reading things people share, I’ve been honestly kind of frustrated when I could tell the content was AI-generated. I like to think of writing as a way of sharing what’s in my head, and reading AI-generated content doesn’t really connect with me with another person the same way that content that’s genuinely authored by a real person does.
I tried out Simon’s highlighting tool, took a look at the source of the cliches, a page on Wikipedia, and tested it out on something I was reading that smelled like AI. While the tool highlighted a part of the text as an AI cliche, it wasn’t the part of the text that stood out to me. I found that Simon’s tool was missing a rule that would highlight that part, so I did what any reasonable professional writer with a degree in computer science would do, I submitted a pull request!
The following is the test configuration for the new rule now caught by Simon’s AI cliche highlighter.
“This is not a tool, but a philosophy,” with a value of 1, triggers the not-but rule. “He did not buy it,” with a value of 0, shouldn’t.
['not-but', 'This is not a tool, but a philosophy.', 1],
['not-but', 'The empty state isn’t filler. It’s orientation.', 1],
['not-but', 'It is not merely useful, but essential.', 0],
['not-but', 'He did not buy it.', 0],
['not-but', 'She was not sure about the plan.', 0],
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