The letters to the editor this week brought to a head something that had been simmering for a while, a dilemma that we meant to deal with but had not yet confronted — what to do about submissions that appear to be the product of artificial intelligence, rather than an original work by a real person. Forced this week to reflect, we say passing off a machine-written missive as an original letter betrays the spirit of the open forum we work hard to provide.
Though we do not like it, we acknowledge there is an unavoidable tradition of ghostwriting for others, especially around election time. Having dealt with the letters as long as we have, it is easy to spot certain scribblers’ “voices” when they turn up with other folks’ identities attached. No one political persuasion has greater guilt than the others, as best we can tell, so perhaps the playing field is somewhat level.
A.I. seems another matter. A.I. writing falls into a new space, neither original work nor outright plagiarism, though it seems mostly like the latter.
To what degree A.I. detectors can be viewed as effective is a new subject of academic research. The longer a sample is, the better detecting systems are, and they are improving by the day. One suspiciously wordy letter we recently tested came back as 100 percent-A.I. when run through three of the leading commercially available analysis tools. None of the other letters we tried this week produced so definitive a result. Just one was flagged as a mixture of definite A.I. and original work; the rest were supposedly clean.
As ever, policing letter writers’ truthfulness is not something we want to do. Rather, we hope our correspondents will follow an honor code of sorts, in that anything they submit is their own work, neither written by another person nor a machine. We do not ask much of our letter writers — coherence is not ours to judge, as the late publisher used to say. But it is our view that when one’s name appears at the end of a message, it represents not just the signer’s views but is his or her own creation as well. The readers are owed at least that much.