The Broken Legibility of Effort: How AI Has Made It Harder to Tell What's Human-Made

Summary

This article explores how the rise of LLMs and AI-generated content has broken our ability to discern whether something was created with genuine human effort — what the author calls "legibility of effort." The author, a creative technologist, reflects on how AI-generated text, images, and software have made it difficult to tell at a glance whether something took meaningful human work. The piece examines the psychological and cultural impact of this shift, from the paralysis it creates for creators to the erosion of trust in digital artifacts. It argues that we need new heuristics and social signals to restore legibility of effort in a world where AI can convincingly mimic human output.

Source

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