The Editor’s Note
Note from the Desk of Pen2Profit:
OMG, even with 5 decades of professional editorial experience, I might have been hornswoggled!
After publishing the piece, The Sanctuary and the Marketplace, I spent some time down a rabbit hole—the kind of digital burrowing one does when a contributor feels just a little too perfect. An excellent Substack writer triggered my bunny dive with a message that he suspected something wasn’t quite ringing true with a certain Substacker.
I was skeptical—it’s really crappy to pin a “bot” label on a fellow writer. It’s also crappy to be taken in by the deluge of artificial writing and artificial people multiplying like…um…rabbits.
But you see, Mo Rivers is a dream guest. He is polite, his grammar is impeccable, and he never misses a deadline. But in our community, where we celebrate the messy, wry, and deeply lived-in experience of writers who have actually seen a thing or two, Mo’s work triggered what I call Stepford Prose Syndrome.
There is a swirling debate in the Substack ether about whether Mo Rivers is a remarkably prolific human or a very well-mannered algorithm. After reviewing the architectures of tapestries and the oddly soul-cleansed prose, I’ve realized that if Mo is human, he has successfully mimicked a machine. If he is a machine, he has successfully mimicked a very boring, verbose human.
I did some Sherlock Holmsing and found this:
AI checker originality.ai says Mo’s most recent essay is 99% likely to be AI-generated. QuillBot says
29% Identical
27% Paraphrased AI
41% Minor changes
3% Human written text, with a 97% likelihood of accuracy.
There’s been a rumbling on Notes that Mo might be extoplasmic.
I am reluctant to pin any writer with the label AI-gen, but my explorations this morning were interesting. There is no mention of or breadcrumb trail for a writer named Mo Rivers across the internet. No Facebook. No Medium, no social media. But, but…he’s a writer!. Searching his image with Google Lens returns a message that this guy doesn’t exist on any known websites--unusual for a man of his age in today’s world. There are pictures of my dog online that I don’t recall putting there—do you know a single person whose social media image is available in only ONE instance?
I noticed that he has only emailed me once, though I have told him if he wants to submit guest posts, he needs to email them--and his email address is @substack.com. Again, unusual. His About page on Substack is the same sort of academic, intellectual voice his posts have, with not one single specific background reference--all generic.
At Pen2Profit, I prioritize the gritty details of a life lived over 50—the kind of writing that smells like coffee and old books, not a server farm in Northern Virginia. I’m leaving this post up as a museum exhibit. Read it and ask yourself, where is the heartbeat? Moving forward, the Write-Earn-Repeat philosophy will remain strictly carbon-based. If you’re going to write for me, I want to see your fingerprints on the glass.
But what if I’m an asshat and he’s a human being?
If Mo emails me to protest his humanity, I’ll wipe the egg off my face and be quite happy.
I’ll be over the moon to hear there’s a pulse there. Mo, my dear, you’ve written yourself into such a state of polish that you’ve managed to almost pass the human test. But the more I read of your work, the more troubled I was. For a brand like Pen2Profit, which relies on authentic, experienced voices, your style is currently too optimized. Give me some grit, some dirt, and a story about a time you actually failed at something—without using the word ‘tapestry’—and we’ll talk.”
Fool me once…
Well, it’s my nature to bond with, engage with, and help support writers, and I don’t plan to stop trusting just because I got blindsided. If you have a great idea for a guest post that will help all my readers, followers, and mentees, email it on over. I’ll make sure I read a little more cautiously and find a little grunge on the prose.
Thanks for being here, human people. And you bots? Get off my lawn. Real writers—if you have something to add or experience with Mo, I’d love to hear it in the comments!
I have a "No AI" badge available at https://katharinewrites.substack.com/p/no-ai-badge-now-available-for-substack (won't prevent the use of an AI text generator, but may help).
I went hook, line, and sinker for "Mo's" work Maryan. It seems to me now that this is someone who is using AI at a skillful level to mimic a human, but the tells are there if I start to look. I am both sad and mad at the time I invested in my conversations with this account, and hope that I can learn to spot the differences between an authentic person and AI content earlier in the process and exercise better discretion, while at the same time not becoming too jaded or guarded or skeptical of those I'm engaging with. The AI turn of events in the writing world is a sad sad affair, though ultimately I believe the goodness of humans and real writers will somehow prevail. Those of us who want to will always find a way to connect honestly and authentically.