Who actually wrote this? My strange, horrifying month fighting the AI slopocalypse

iStock; Getty Images; Tyler Le/BI Recently, I've found myself asking the same question over and over again: Did AI write this? If you spend any amount of time online, you probably have, too. Just a few short years since the advent of ChatGPT, the internet has devolved into a bot-generated wasteland. Experts warned us that the slopocalypse was coming, and it is here. The world isn't taking this lying down. Publishers are canceling book contracts. Op-eds by billionaires and professors and politicians are getting outed. The uproar has become so intense that companies are scrambling to respond. LinkedIn is encouraging users to flag suspicious posts. Substack is tagging suspected AI writing with a label. Google is building tools to help people check whether the images and videos they see were made with AI. Anthropic is now watermarking the text Claude generates. That has stirred up its own backlash, mounted by people who say these efforts to identify and root out AI authorship are antiquated, punitive, and defamatory. We're now all trying to figure out just how much of our writing we want to cede to AI. Maybe you think it should be used to write everything. Maybe you think it should be used to write absolutely nothing. Chances are, you're probably like me, drifting somewhere in between these two shores, uneasy with its ubiquity and also eager to get its help. Every single one of us has drawn and redrawn our own lines, clashing with everyone else's, making us incredibly mad in the process. To have any hope of reaching a shared norm, we need to answer a deeper question: Why does it matter so much to us in the first place whether something originated from a human mind or an AI? We don't think twice about all kinds of things that were once made by people and are now made by machines — textiles, furniture, the box of chocolate chip cookies I couldn't resist buying at the store. So why is writing — or for that matter, drawing or composing music or creating videos — any different? Who cares, as long as it's good? I cared. Why else was I squinting at every suspicious passage I encountered, like a detective manically swabbing for the bot's fingerprints? So I turned to an AI detector. Study after study has shown that most people are actually bad at spotting machine-generated writing, and Pangram — the leading AI detection tool on the market — claims to be 99.7% accurate. By seeing clearly who or what wrote every single sentence I consumed for a few weeks, I thought I'd get a little closer to understanding why this distinction is so important to us. I started my investigation with LinkedIn. I figured the mecca for the world's most shameless corporate professionals was where I was most likely to face the onslaught of AI writing head-on. With Pangram's Chrome extension, every post and comment in my newsfeed showed up with a label: a red rectangle with a robot's head marked "AI" (at least 80% AI-generated); a green rectangle with a person's head marked "Human" (at least 90% human-written); or a yellow rectangle with a robot's head marked "Mixed." As I scrolled through my newsfeed, I scanned for the robot's head as if I were a lion in the savannah scanning for prey. One founder I know, Peter Pang, appeared to have not posted a single human-written thing in more than a year. Pang is a cofounder of Creao AI, an agentic AI platform, and his posts were jam-packed with AI's tells (one example: "AI doesn't just make engineers faster. It forces you to rethink what engineering even is"). Did he even look at what his agents drafted before they blasted it to his 3,000-plus followers? It was like I woke up with a new superpower that could show me who had gotten Botox. When I asked him, he said he does review and tinker with what his agent prepares for him, "including this reply" (Pangram flagged his email to me as 100% AI-generated). He gives the agent some ideas or an outline, after which it pulls research and drafts something for him to read. "The final text carries my views," he said, "and I am the one who hits publish." Other people in my network were more occasional AI users. I kept a mental tally of them: a well-known economist, a few journalists, and a lot of marketing people. It was like I woke up with a new superpower that could show me who had gotten Botox. Was I right to feel so judgy? On the one hand, using Claude to write a LinkedIn post probably wasn't that much worse than the crime of posting on LinkedIn at all. Even pre-AI, the site was already overrun with insufferable humblebrags and cringey confessions about a spouse's cancer journey that taught you how to become a better salesperson of cybersecurity software. You don't come to LinkedIn expecting authenticity. Maybe the discovery that, in more than 40% of all longform posts that Pangram analyzed on LinkedIn, people were deploying AI to further their personal branding missions wasn't such a huge deal. But these posts were showing up next to their supposed authors' n