> _Note: No large language model was used in the production of this text. No kitten was strangled either, and technically the set of events which_ failed _to happen is infinite, but this particular non-event_ matters. This week has been an interesting one, as someone doing their PhD involving 'generative AI', _i.e._ proprietary, online systems backed by large language models. My topic is on students use in assessment, or specifically the attitudes of faculty towards that, but the encroachment of the technology on all aspects of society is hard to avoid. I found out from Flick at the Library, via a doctoral pal, that Canada was going [to stop issuing](https://www.canada.ca/en/library-archives/services/publishers/isbn/about.html#5) ISBN numbers for books made up of synthetic text. We applauded the decision, although, like all legal decisions, it will be tested at the point of enforcement. The adverb in '_primarily_ generated by AI' is load bearing here. I know too well the issues with detection, the fact detection systems are themselves opaque machine learning systems, and, in the case of student work in assessment, how both false positives and false negatives will tend to penalise certain demographics which are already the victims of educational inequities. As per a recent item in Mystery AI Hype Theatre 3000, [pangram is not an oracle](https://buttondown.com/maiht3k/archive/pangram-is-not-an-oracle/). Google's [SynthID](https://deepmind.google/models/synthid/) technology, which, they had deployed in production for two years with little fanfare, is the one Anthropic made a [big fuss of announcing](https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-text-watermark) they were going to use for watermarking. Before it, making synthetic text (pictures are another matter) recognisable as such was presumed, if not impossible, certainly moot. These watermarks defend against false positive, but they relie on a continuous sequence of token as generated, and easy to defeat with a modicum of edition. Still, the mere possibility of watermarking, detection and a norms of disclosure is getting the slop-mongers very upset, as illustrated by the [reaction of the Substack community](https://on.substack.com/p/how-writers-are-reacting-to-substacks) upon an announcement to this effect. >Norms around AI use and its disclosure are unsettled. But we have made the assessment that while the use of AI isn’t necessarily a problem, a lack of transparency around it definitely is. (Substack, 2026) Bear in mind, this is _Substack_ claiming lack of transparency is problematic. The same Substack which [perfectly knowingly makes money from hate speech, and enables its speakers to monetise it.](https://lithub.com/the-case-against-substack-icymi/) So if _they_ draw a line... Still, tomes of slop not getting an a ISBN number (in Canada) seems to me to constitute progress. At least symbolically, it acknowledges that synthetic text and human utterances are categorically different, and should be treated differently. If anything because people use [effort as a heuristic for quality](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022103103000659) (Kruger _et al._, 2004). Which goes towards explaining the ['social penalty' AI users suffer](https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2426766122) (Reif, Larrick and Soll, 2025). The same week, the same friend showed me what, for this very reason, I would hesitate to call a book. A 'paperback bound printout', let's say, on father's rights. The person-credited-as-author on this text self-publishes, she tells me, up to *twenty* such book-shaped-objects a month. [In Silicon Valley, they call this kind of grift 'high-agency'](https://harpers.org/archive/2026/03/childs-play-sam-kriss-ai-startup-roy-lee/) (Kriss, 2026). This one is meant to give clarity to fathers as to their rights under the law, but contain no references, be it to acts of law, or even secondary sources. In a twist of irony, the blurb at the back of the... thing, explained that the man credited with its authorship went through a divorce and was offered a lot of advice, but little in the way of facts. Yet, without some kind of truth grounding, surely text generated stochastically is only factually correct *by accident*. We even found a sentence along the lines of "make sure to verify this with the actual law", which speaks to the amount of editing the text went through. But with an average of 36 hours from idea to final proof, this is to be expected. This must be what they call 'Divorced Dad Energy'. At least he is not [weaponising the low barrier of entry](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-10-10/cam-wilson-ai-book-copyright-laws/107220714) to the production of a legitimate looking text, but he is certainly making the most of how low the barrier is to use the short production cycle typical of social media influencers to reward-hack the distribution algorithms of print materials, which to a degree print-on-demand services for self-published authors had incentivised. The mass production of (lately, self-published) genre fiction as always been a thing, and these involved in it have long been early adopters of many a shortcut to production cycles. Coincidentally, this happened the week of an event for PhD students with presentations (from both students and staff) much of which contained ostensibly synthetic images, without, of course, any declaration. That evening a few of us were at the pub bemoaning the normalisation of undeclared use of synthetic media in all fields of life, not least of which higher education, which is highly ironic given students have been dragged in front of academic disciplinary panels for arguably lesser moral transgressions. The OIA website has made for gripping reading of late. Us AI-critical PhDs will be putting out an open letter or position paper, and, in the interim, a blog on the Library's site is not a bad place to stake our claim. Because, before we had *grand theft autocomplete* (since then, grand theft _autocracy_, eh?) abstracting and absconding the product of human intellectual labour into weight matrices, the places where knowledge was stored, indexed, and made accessible was libraries. Libraries value authorship and its attribution. Libraries were, before the internet, the place were references could be checked. Libraries act as diffusion nexus _and_ quality control for human knowledge; that is knowledge for, but also _by_ humans. Libraries are not perfect, and this quality control has been, at times, gatekeeping. That said, they are _barely problematic_ compared to the "generative AI" industry and its practices. And given that [John Dewey was involved, this should speak to how bad](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISUS5IqAJzI) the AI industry is. https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/ Our position is not that people should not produce synthetic media. This is entirely between them and their conscience. It is simply that: - undisclosed use of synthetic media implicitly equates it with genuine, human-made text and images. - We should fight against the normalisation of such undisclosed use. - We should ask, whenever possible, if "AI" was used, and if so why this was not disclosed. - We should, in particular, *explicitly disclose the absence of AI use*. To show it still occurs, the collective presumptions notwithstanding. In winning Turing's imitation game (1950), which was a thought experiment, not a test to be operationalised into a success criteria, LLMs have managed to plausibly pass for humans. We have to wonder whether it means we are the ones who lost the game, rendered unable to recognise other humans now that outwards signs of humanity are increasingly imitable by machines. Artificial Imitation, more like. ## References Kriss, S. (2026) ‘Child’s Play: Can the Democrats harness the new prairie populism?’, _Harper’s Magazine_. Available at: [https://harpers.org/archive/2026/03/childs-play-sam-kriss-ai-startup-roy-lee/](https://harpers.org/archive/2026/03/childs-play-sam-kriss-ai-startup-roy-lee/) (Accessed: 13 October 2026). Kruger, J. _et al._ (2004) ‘The effort heuristic’, _Journal of Experimental Social Psychology_, 40(1), pp. 91–98. Available at: [https://doi.org/10.1016/S0022-1031(03)00065-9](https://doi.org/10.1016/S0022-1031\(03\)00065-9). Reif, J.A., Larrick, R.P. and Soll, J.B. (2025) ‘Evidence of a social evaluation penalty for using AI’, _Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences_, 122(19), p. e2426766122. Available at: [https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2426766122](https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2426766122). Turing, A. (1950) ‘Computing machinery and intelligence.’, _Mind_, 59(236), pp. 433–60.