The unintended neee (sic) led me to reflect on authenticity and our new world of challenges. The world of artificial intelligence is upon us. It is impacting how we each choose to work, and in a Rush-like realization, we are all making choices. (Freewill, High Tones, 1980). If you have never read those lyrics, you should.
Last month, the Workers' Compensation Institute in Orlando featured many AI segments. I asked Gemini to analyze the program for AI elements, and it said:
"There are 13 specific sessions detailed across the schedule that explicitly address artificial intelligence topics, along with a dedicated full-day AI & Technology Breakout Track"
There was much AI discussion. And there are underlying elements of reticence, curiosity, enthusiasm, and even fanaticism. I know people who literally experience the urge, but before deciding to eat, go to bed, or move their bowels, they "ask AI what it thinks." I fear for their Wall-E future (Pixar 2008).
We have all witnessed the arrival of AI trends on social media. There have been many fads and experiments already. They have led me to learn about the three dots on LinkedIn that allow me to mark content "not interested." That is my first reaction to the AI images and obviously AI-generated dreck posts that increasingly invade my consciousness.
People have begun, outside the "wild west" of social media, to acknowledge their use of AI. Others not so much. I have begun to decline collaborative opportunities that include contributors who can't or won't be transparent about their AI engagement. One recent social media meltdown essentially concluded "so what," but it took a lot of paragraphs to get there.
Some guidance has even begun to appear on the what, when, and how. Some academics are even engaging.
More frequently now, you will see acknowledgement, such as
- "The web banner was created by ___________, with the assistance of the Google Gemini Pro AI System."
- "During the preparation of this work, the author used ChatGPT (Version 4o, OpenAI) to improve the clarity and readability of the Discussion section"
- "The authors employed Claude 3.5 Sonnet (Anthropic) in July 2026 to generate concise summaries of text from the initial pool of 150 peer-reviewed articles"
These are largely consistent in their simple transparency. Of course, we all acknowledge that there are examples already in the marketplace of AI-generated dreck that are presented as human output without such admission or explanation.
I was recently amused to run across a LinkedIn post in which the author noted a "neee" for something. I have to admit that I also once made a typographical error. Even in the age of grammar checkers (AI) and assistance, I make mistakes.
I pointed out the "neee" and the author replied good-naturedly:
"I suppose the pivot could be that at least it proves I don’t just share AI-created posts but actually insert human in the loop and thus some human error."
That may be the right outcome. In acknowledging that we are all flawed and will make mistakes, it is certainly appropriate. But the AI aficionados might suggest we ask AI what it thinks. I did, with
"claude, can I prompt an AI to create a writing for me with the explicit caveat that it include multiple subtle errors so as to appear human-generated?"
Claude admitted
"yes — you can ask me (or another AI) to insert typos, awkward phrasing, inconsistent style, or other "human-like" imperfections into a piece of writing. I can follow that kind of instruction."
In the end, I think we're going to "neee a bigger boat" (Jaws, 1975), or neee a better instrument, indicator, or metric (I got those from a thesaurus - that's a book I periodically use; look it up in your Funk and Wagnalls).
* Nothing in this post or any other on this blog was created with artificial intelligence. Some might argue no intelligence at all was use. That is for the reader to discern.
