For those of you who write on Medium or plan to do so, you might aware that the platform is strongly against the use of AI-generated content.

Medium values authentic stories written by real people. It’s almost impossible to find any publication on the platform that doesn’t explicitly state in their guidelines that AI-generated content is not allowed.

I really appreciate this - that there is still a place where people can write genuine stories and not having to compete with AI. Sure, you can still have AI written content there, but I can guarantee you that if you want to publish in a publication, most of won't accept your articles.

My approach to writing with AI

I am not against using AI, as long as I use it to polish articles or refine existing drafts that are genuinely mine.

As a matter of fact, I use AI when I write my Typeshare articles if I don't like certain paragraphs and to check for grammar / spelling mistakes considering that English is not my native language.

But on Medium ? I stay away from AI, like a vampire from garlic.

The publication rejection that caught me off guard

A while back I wrote an article about "3 Mistakes I Made when Starting Side Hustles Alongside my 9-5". The article had been rejected by a publication. They said I used AI to write it.

Just because my introduction was somewhat generic and didn’t delve deeply into my personal experiences, they assumed the article was AI-generated. This incident made me more cautious about how my writing is perceived.

Every now and then, I check some of my articles I write for Medium with an AI detector. And to my dismay, a lot of the things I write (even in 1st person) are sometimes flagged as written by AI. Phrases such as the ones below:

"I don't want to end this article on a doom and gloom note (even though I am tempted to)."

"I asked myself this question a lot before I started writing fiction: how much do I need to read in my genre of choice to become a decent writer?"

One of my articles was flagged as being written 50% by AI, by 3 detectors, when in reality it was not.

So even authentic human writing, especially when it's introspective, can be mistaken for AI-generated text, which is quite worrying when publishing on a platform such as Medium.

Two of my articles so far have been rejected due to suspicions that they were written by AI. They were a bit more formal, yes, due to the nature of the topic and I had tried to weave my personal experience into the conclusions I drawn to make it more palatable for Medium. Yet, they were still rejected.

Is AI getting too good?

So, naturally, this begs the question: is AI getting so good that it writes as brilliantly, if not better than a human ? Or are we, as writers, beginning to unconsciously sound like robots when crafting more formal articles?

I think the AI is getting freakishly good. It's no longer bland and it can even mimic writing with emotion. That's because, after all, it was trained using best quality materials out there: books, research papers, Wikipedia. Quality vetted writing. Hence why it can sound so good and it's becoming hard to tell the difference on what's written by AI vs what's written by a human.

But, as I mentioned in another article, by training the LLM with these kind of data, they infringed copyright laws. So much so, that authors like George R.R. Martin, Jodi Picoult, George Saunders are suing open AI arguing that their copyrighted works were used without consent.

The risk of over-reliance on AI

If we use AI to write all the content for us, we end up regurgitating what other authors said before us.

A few weeks ago, I was brainstorming names for locations in my novel. When I used AI for inspiration on city names, I discovered that many of the suggested names were actually locations names taken from some of the books by my favorite authors. This reinforced the risk of unintentionally copying others when using AI tools, especially in fiction writing.

So now, I steer away from doing any research for my novel with the help of AI so I don't end up accidentally in a world created by another author.

Finding Balance

For those of us who value genuine storytelling, the challenge lies in navigating this new era of AI-driven creativity without compromising our unique voices.

I am all in for efficiency of editing, polishing or correcting grammar / spelling mistakes with AI. But let's not lose the joy of writing, the joy of creating.

I'd love to know your thoughts on this.

Proving You're Not a Robot when Writing on Medium

My musing on the struggle for authenticity when writing on Medium

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