tldr: ai is a tool

Scribes used to end a manuscript with a colophon: a few lines naming the hand that copied it, sometimes the date and the patron, occasionally a complaint about the cold or a request for beer. Disclosure, before disclosure had a compliance department.

Ancient writers also used to have these things called amanuenses. Personal secretaries (slaves, professionals, friends) who faithfully transcribed the words and intentions of their authors from their spoken word through the quill onto the sheet of papyrus. We know Paul used one. Julius Caesar and Pliny the Elder used one. And so did Cicero, whose secretary Tiro invented a shorthand to keep up with dictation and through it preserved the very letters we still read.

A Torah scroll with three errors in a column was corrected; with four, it was retired whole and buried. The scribes ran on correction thresholds, not purity tests. One thousand years later, people were concerned about the proliferation of letters. Christianity was a uniquely trusting literary institution, as it began via the flurry of commended messengers running across the ancient world.

Fourteen centuries later, people were concerned about this new technology, the printing press. How could anyone trust that the words of a mass-made physical copy were accurate? How could society adapt to the unlearned and unvirtuous suddenly accessing elite knowledge?

Forty years ago, people were concerned about this new technology, the internet. How could anyone trust what was written on the internet? Was it not obviously foolish to upload a photo or purchase a product online?

Now: do we have a difference of sheer kind, or simple capacity?

Do you now need to test that the fat fingers hit every single key and pretend as if search engines and autocorrect and copy-paste were fine but no farther? Should we now put our faith in ever-expanding purity tests and scarlet letters? Or should we finally reckon with the fact that the standard has actually always been the same:

Humanity has been supplemented and augmented by technology from the very beginning. Who is truly responsible for any particular output? Ultimately the man who acknowledges his responsibility, or is forced to. It has always been so.

This page is mine. AI and related technologies are an artifact of investigation, a genre of study, a tool of use, and a detector tool will never tell you a telos.

Some pieces are written entirely by hand, and where a publication's policy asks for a more restricted process, that policy governs the piece.

Updated August 2026.