I had ChatGPT generate some lorem ipsum for a project, sort of playfully, told it to generate the transcript of someone testing out a microphone, or some such. Here’s the text it gave me, in full:
Okay, okay, deep breaths. This is it. The moment I’ve been waiting for. My big break. I can’t mess this up. This mic test is crucial. Everything needs to be perfect. No feedback, no pitch problems, no nothing. Just pure, beautiful sound.
“Testing, testing, one, two, three.” Okay, that sounds…okay. But is it good enough? I can’t tell. I can never tell. Maybe I’m being too hard on myself. Maybe I’m overthinking it. But I can’t afford to underthink it. Not tonight.
“Is this thing on? Hello?” Great, now I sound like an idiot. I need to focus. I need to nail this. The crowd is counting on me. My bandmates are counting on me. And most importantly, I’m counting on me.
“Testing, testing, one, two, three.” Nope, still not good enough. My voice sounds thin, weak. I need more power, more energy. “Testing, testing, one, two, three.” There we go, that’s more like it. But is it too much? Am I shouting into the mic? Is it buzzing? I can’t tell.
I wish I could just fast-forward to the actual performance. When the adrenaline kicks in and I don’t have time to overthink. When I can just let the music flow through me and take me over. But I can’t skip this step. I have to get it right.
“Testing, testing, one, two, three.” Okay, that’s it. That’s the one. I’m ready. Let’s do this. Let’s rock this place to the ground. Bring on the lights, the sound, the crowd. I’m ready for my moment. Let’s make it unforgettable.
This is all fine and good. But on a hunch, I fed it into some AI detectors — it sounded lively enough to pass for human, I thought — and sure enough, this text fooled most of them and it fooled them a lot.
Me, I’m just glad I’m not in a profession where my success depends on being able to distinguish human from AI text, because it’s mostly indistinguishable just off the cuff and the would-be detectors are beyond useless. In fact, in purporting a solution and giving false positives and negatives, they’re worse than if they never existed at all. I have pity for the person whose fate is being determined by these Clouseau-level detectives.
