Adjudicate

On Substack's new AI detector, the word of the day, and what we may miss if we keep criminalizing each other.

Sometimes I wake up in the morning with a word bumping through my brain. No explanation, as if it’s just assigned with my waking to be the theme my thoughts will explore that day. This may be the vestiges of my Sesame Street childhood. The letter of the day is…

This morning, it was Adjudicate. That little darling was waiting right behind my eyelids as I threw my linen blanket off my body first thing. Adjudicate? Where did that come from?

When I stood in front of the mirror brushing my teeth, I pondered. Adjudicate? What exactly does that even mean?

I have a condition common to many voracious readers. I know a lot of words that I can use in context but cannot fully define and often cannot even pronounce aloud. I like words, kind of like I like rocks. Sometimes when I’m out on a walk or a hike or just a stroll down my own driveway, I’ll come upon one that catches my eye. I’ll pick it up and hold it up to the light. Examine it, slip it into my pocket to put it on the windowsill to admire later. Maybe give it a tumble in the rock tumbler, wrap it up with wire and adorn my own body with it.

A good word is like a good rock, you know. Stumbled upon, appreciated, studied. I keep a running list on my phone called “Words I Didn’t Know”. I collect them in my reading and in my scrolling. Sometimes I’ll see one on a sign. Occasionally they really are entirely new to me. Aptronym. Armscye. Quaaludes. More often they are words I know on a surface level. That I know in context, but I have not really looked at, used, tumbled. Pejorative. Immolation. Adjudicate.

Adjudicate: to make a formal, binding judgment or decision on a disputed matter. It typically involves acting as an impartial judge, reviewing evidence, and issuing an official ruling to resolve a conflict or settle rights.

Ah, adjudicate. There you are. Making it plain. I should have realized. Should have minded my Latin roots and all that.

Yesterday, Substack rolled out a new feature. A scanner that determines what degree of AI was used in creating a work of writing. The immediate response I saw from people (before I’d checked my own email and read the announcement) was praise. “Finally, a delineation between those of us who can write and those who can’t.” Insert raised pinky finger here.

Listen, I get the argument. I’m a content creator. I will not say “by trade” or “for my career”. I knew what I was signing up for when I decided to put all my eggs in that basket. I knew that I would be fortunate to have a solid five years before the algorithm shifted out of my favor. I remember MySpace, I had a long friends list there. I changed my top 8 weekly so nobody would feel jilted.

And I’ve had a lot more than five years. I’ve paid my bills by making content for nearly a decade. I’ve seen the writing on the wall regarding AI for at least the last couple of years. Within weeks of GPT tools becoming available at a consumer level, I could feel it shifting the world in which I earn my living. I watched people who had always struggled to form a solid caption begin posting multiple times a day with long paragraphs studded with emojis. I recognized the tells of em dashes and triads of sentence fragments that drove home an idea. I quickly felt the discomfort of a lot of words being used to say very little.

I didn’t mourn the em dash the way some of you did. I was never overly fond of them in the first place. However, the sentence fragments for emphasis? A damn shame to lose. And the overuse of short, isolated sentences for emotional pause mid-work?

That’s one of the strongest tricks I know.

I found myself writing in reaction to AI, looking to prove myself. I was self-editing and changing the way I’d written for years and years just to avoid someone booger hunting through my work and accusing me of cheating. The stacks of magazines containing my articles, the published books before these tools existed felt like they did little to prove my voice. They certainly didn’t stop the drive-by accusers that commented “This would be good if you’d actually written it.”

It bothered me. I wanted to defend myself. I did defend myself. I saw others doing the same. Not the em dash! Don’t take the em dash from me!

Then one day I was reading my beloved Mary Oliver, my hero if I ever had one. And there on the page among her lovely words were em dashes and fragments and the kind of repetition that now gets treated as a tell of dishonest work.

I was with my brother in Arkansas last week and he was talking about his disdain for electric vehicles. He said he’d been pretty anti-. Anti-elon. Anti-EV. Anti-potential-for-government-overreach. Then he ran into an elderly couple charging their Tesla on a cross-country road trip and they told him “This gave us our life back.”

It gave him great pause. It didn’t undo his concern but it provided a counter he hadn’t considered. He’s pro-elderly. Advocates for them in his community. Bends over backwards to make time and space for anyone over the age of 75. And when this couple shared their experience, he was so deeply convicted that he was able to be so adamantly Anti-a-thing-he-didnt-need because he didn’t need it.

Immediately, I was reminded of a woman I met last year. She is in her sixties, lovely in a soft and slightly ethereal way. She’s always draped in linen and trailing crochet and jewelry that is almost too-much but somehow perfect. Her eyes are deep and so is the well of her wisdom. She gave me one of her books. A self-published paperback. The moment I opened it, I recognized the tells. I felt my pinky raise.

Then she said it, bold as brass. “I used AI to write it. I’m severely dyslexic. All my knowledge and the things I’ve learned, I could never, until these tools came along, possibly hope to convey. I can’t stop writing now! I’ve written three books! I’m thrilled! I can finally share the things I’ve spent my life learning.” I could feel her relief, her joy, the pride she felt in her work. And I was convicted too.

I’ve been a writer since I was a kid. Structure, storytelling, funneling emotion through my lifelong word collection onto a page is, I think, immutable to me. I’m not great at when to use commas or quotations, and my spelling isn’t the best. Thankfully, a little paperclip with eyeballs and an offer to help started solving that problem when I was in middle school. I’ve never felt a lick of shame about using it. The red lines that show up under my mistakes have always felt like mercy and not indictment of my own limitations.

I’ve noticed something in social online spaces since AI has become part of the terrain we are all navigating. When a new Facebook trend peaks, and my feed is full of AI-generated images of a person in cartoon form, alongside sheepish captions claiming, “Oh alright, I’ll bite”, there is a counter trend of the people in the comments section declaring the cost, holding said picture-poster accountable for the risk of boiling oceans and spreading deserts. And for a while I sided with the latter, until I started seeing massive data centers being erected at breakneck speed around the country.

They blow through the red tape the rest of us must mind when building. Though I’ve seen triumphant stories of communities banding together and thwarting the threat of data centers sprouting in their backyards, there are many well on their way to completion no matter how much effort was put into stopping them. Those data centers aren’t needed for your stupid profile picture or the fact that you asked Claude for a meal plan.

I lost count of how many Flock cameras I passed when I drove from SC to AR last week. Countless. Last time I flew, I don’t know how many times my face was scanned. I was shopping for a new leather purse this week, and had to decline five different websites the right to collect and sell my information. Just to browse their stock and ponder if I’d like to purchase, I have to pointedly decline the right to whatever they can collect from me while I’m there.

But the even greater issue, I think, is that we are being wildly distracted. I can see all this clearly, but can’t find the real solution. This is the same fight as in the comments of those cartoon Facebook pictures. Of course, I’m not tempted by that because I’m a photographer. I don’t need something to write my articles because I’m a writer. If they made a program that would go to the post office for me and remember to schedule the dog groomer, I’d probably get off the high horse real fast, and I remind myself all of this to stay focused on what is true. Menial use of AI tools that keeps people divided and accusatory of each other keeps us from seeing the bigger picture. High horses make poor vantage points if preserving humanity is the goal. And the boxing ring was built to give us a place to land the blows of our frustration. I know I certainly feel a mounting rage at the world that’s being built around me, in spite of me.

But if you find yourself in a boxing ring with an opponent, you’d do well to remember that someone owns the arena. The fighters both leave bloody, but the owner leaves rich. Treating this like a black and white issue in which you can take the high ground or the low is missing the point entirely.

Do understand, I’m not advocating for AI use. I love community and art and expression. Photography and writing, communication and creation are the greatest skills I have. I am among those with the most to lose. But I also know that authenticity is not easily forged. I decided, shortly after these tools were handed to humanity, that I wasn’t interested in anything that would atrophy my skills. Muscles, when unused, go flaccid. Thought processes and abilities do too. It goes for intuition just the same. The irony of an AI program trained to adjudicate AI in writing, given to people so they can bypass their own instinct, does, I think, pretty much sum up this time we’re living in.

An impartial judge is only needed if we ourselves have lost the ability to be one. Adjudicate. It’s more important than ever.