In The Faculty (1998), The Thing (1982), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), and other alien invasion movies, characters begin to ask themselves, Who is an alien and who is still human? The same kinds of questions must have come up among resistance movements during World War II. Who is a spy, a collaborator, an informer, and who is still with us? Paranoia creeps in. Tests of loyalty or identity become necessary.
We find ourselves in the same situation today in terms of our culture. Whether you're a reader or a writer, you have to ask yourself, Which authors have turned to AI and which have not? Which novels, short stories, essays, or other compositions are human and which are not? Everyone is now suspect. You, me, everyone.
I believe there are tests to determine whether something is AI or not. These are of course digital and so subject to being corrupted by AI. AI, after all, wants us to believe that it is human. It was programmed to be that way. The only good and reliable test is the test of time, for if a work was published before AI, then it is human. If after, then it is suspect and may very well be tainted. As much as you might like it, the book you're reading right now may have been created by a pod person.
People who rely on AI to do their thinking and writing for them want to claim that its products are still human because they were prompted, modified, revised, or edited by humans. They might even claim that works created by AI are human because AI is human, or close enough to qualify. There is a materialist or transhumanist bent to beliefs like these. What these machine-people don't realize is that there is and will forever be an unbridgeable gap between the living and non-living worlds, between man and machine. I would sooner trust the humanness of a painting done by an elephant or a novel written by an infinite number of monkeys typing on a infinite number of typewriters than I would a single sentence written by AI.
Again, AI is not the problem. It is people using AI who are the problem. If it isn't already happening, there will be writers who will conceal the fact that they have used AI to write for them. There won't be any Pure Fiction and Literature Act the way there was a Pure Food and Drug Act more than a century ago. You won't be informed about the impurities. Authors, editors, and publishers will not be required to label their products as AI-aided or -generated. Our fiction and literature will instead become adulterated--it already is--and the only surefire way to avoid that adulteration will be to read the works of the past. The good thing is that you don't have to go very far into the past, actually only two or three years, I think, to find works that are one hundred percent human, created in a world free of AI-generation. Beware of anything written since, as it could very well be the work of a robot, alien, or cyborg.
And one more warning: hold onto your books, for if everything ever written is reduced to ones and zeroes and the originals discarded, then the works of the past will almost certainly be altered and adulterated by AI and the people behind it, the result being that there will no longer be a pure human culture.
Copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley
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