‘I 've seen things you people wouldn’t believe,’ the artificial replicant played by Rutger Hauer tells Harrison Ford’s character at the end of the 1982 film Blade Runner. ‘Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.’
The scene always hovers near discussions on the consequences and direction of the adoption and development of artificial intelligence. Hauer’s replicant, in going rogue, demonstrated what in AI discussions we now call agentic AI – making decisions which, in his case, lack guardrails.
At the Gazette, we have had cause to debate our approach to the more mundane scenario of how we treat articles submitted to us which include elements written with the assistance of AI software. The prompt was submitted articles that needed significant work and included specific AI ‘tells’ and concerns over quality.
While we now use software to detect whether some articles were written with the assistance of AI, the Gazette does not have a ‘no-AI’ policy. We have, though, added a section on AI to the ‘Write for us’ guide. It strikes a negative note.
Why? One of the most obvious AI ‘tells’ is text which is so general as to be useless to our specific audience. It displaces personal experience and knowledge that attach to the author.
Then there is originality. Because large language models draw on existing material, they can only safely generate something that has been done before. It is unoriginal.
Accuracy is a problem. AI does not just ‘hallucinate’ fictional case law, which authors can easily check. It can also do the same with more nebulous concepts, failing to convey that some are both contested and controversial – for example, theories around wellbeing and mental health, and topics like diversity.
On style, AI-generated text for articles commonly includes features that would lead to rejection or revision, irrespective of how they were written. These include consecutive paragraphs that end in lists and repetitive phrases.
All of which means that when articles on legal topics are drafted with AI assistance, this increases the likelihood of rejection or significant revision pre-publication. The Blade Runner replicants are rather eloquent. Today’s AI falls short.
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