Joan Westenberg wrote a piece this week about the growing culture of accusing writers of using AI, and it landed with me. The short version: a debut novelist named Mia Ballard had her career destroyed after Reddit and YouTube decided her book was AI-generated. Her publisher pulled it. Her name was ruined. She says she didn’t use AI. Maybe she’s telling the truth, maybe she’s not.

Westenberg’s point is that nobody actually knows, and the tools people use to make these accusations are garbage. OpenAI shut down its own detection tool because it was worse than a coin flip. Stanford researchers found detectors disproportionately flag non-native English speakers and neurodivergent writers. The whole thing feels like a moral panic dressed up as quality control.

Mediocre writing is not proof of a machine. I think about this more than I’d like.