The Craft · Long Read
Are AI Detectors Accurate? How They Get It Wrong and Who Pays
AI detectors get it wrong — and punish real people for being literate and having good style. How the detectors work, who takes the first hit, and how to fight back.
In May 2026, a journalist named Steven Rosenbaum published a book arguing that AI is poisoning the truth. Within a week, The New York Times reported that the book itself contained more than half a dozen quotes fabricated by AI — words that real people like Kara Swisher never said. The man warning you not to trust the machine had quietly trusted the machine. It is a perfect little parable, and it has nothing to do with the people this article is actually about. Because while the Rosenbaum story was front-page entertainment, a quieter scene was playing out in classrooms and editorial inboxes: real writers, who used no AI at all, getting flagged as cheats by software that claims to sniff out ma
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All recent →My Friend Sounds Like ChatGPT Now — and It's Not All Bad
Some are losing their voice. Others are finding one for the first time
AI Token Cost: What Is a Token — and How Every Model Games the Count
Complaints about opaque AI pricing are flooding social media. Which ones hold up to scrutiny and which are just users' overactive imaginations? How do models slip past their own published rate cards? How do usage limits actually work, and why do companies benefit from keeping the explanations as vague as possible?
A Very Expensive Mirror That Always Agrees With You
We spent years teaching artificial intelligence to give us answers we'd like — and now we really don't like the result.
Markdown: the language you use to talk to ChatGPT and Claude
A quick guide to plain text formatting with no hidden styles: why hash signs and asterisks were right under your nose for twenty years, and now suddenly you need them to talk to AI models
When a Stranger's Text Can Give an AI New Orders
Prompt injection lets an outsider hide commands in a page or a document and make an AI follow them instead of its user. Prompt injection is already in the wild, spanning from courtrooms to state-run espionage, and there is no clean fix — only ways to limit the exposure.
NLP Is Back. Now Its Victims Are Neural Networks
Half a century ago, two Californians figured out how to control people through language. Today the same thing is being done to neural networks — and they call it a profession
- 01 ——
The Craft
5 pieces Writing as craft — voice, style, editing, long-form. - 02 ——
The Machine
9 pieces How AI works and where it breaks — memory, context, hallucinations. - 03 ——
The Method
7 pieces Working with AI — prompts, workflows, roles, Deep Research. - 04 ——
The Desk
5 pieces The writer's working environment — editor, sources, focus, tools. - 05 ——
The Stack
7 pieces Models, tools, pricing, market — Claude vs GPT, BYOK, industry shifts.
