WRITING
Is This Text Human-Written or AI-Generated?
A question about the authenticity of texts that are translated by artificial intelligence or other translation apps from their original human-written language *)
Since artificial intelligence became widely accessible at the end of 2023, some issues have emerged regarding texts that were written by humans but translated using artificial intelligence or other translation apps. Medium and other publications are naturally interested in preventing AI-generated content from appearing on their websites, and they often use artificial intelligence in the form of a program that can identify text written by AI rather than by humans. This can result in texts that were originally written by humans in a language other than English, such as Norwegian, being mistaken by the AI detector as text written by AI.
I agree that we should not use artificial intelligence to write texts and pretend they are written by humans. However, we also see many cases where texts are wrongly classified as written by AI when they are written by humans and translated with the help of a translation program or app into English.
The guidelines for publishing texts on different platforms and publications are currently often vague, imprecise, and hard to follow because, among other things, they do not differentiate well enough between AI-generated text and text translated from another language to English with the help of artificial intelligence or a translation program.
This text is an example of a text that was written by a human, me, in my language, Nynorsk, and then translated using a digital resource, in this case, Copilot. Of course, I could have written this text directly in English, but my language would have been influenced by the fact that I have a different mother tongue than English and that I am not as proficient in writing English as a native speaker. A possible alternative for me would have been to write the text in English as well as I could and then let a translation program, app, or other form of artificial intelligence translate my text from my so-called ‘Norwegian-English’ written text to an ‘English-English’ text that has been checked and corrected for Norwegianisms and other errors by artificial intelligence or a translation program.
The challenges of using artificial intelligence and digital aids are many because this is a new field and a new problem area for online publishing and other publishing today. For my part, I have written and published more than 1500 texts in English on medium.com over the past five years and have used translation programs and translation apps available to finish the text in English.
In the beginning, I tried to write the texts directly in English, but I found that they were not as good as I wanted them to be in English, so I have mostly switched to starting with writing the text in Norwegian to express what I want to say authentically, and then I have used digital tools to get the text in English. This cannot be considered the same as using artificial intelligence to generate texts.
What do you think?
Let’s start a discussion and an exchange of information and opinions in the response section.
- ) I checked my text using the digital resource AI Detector — Accurate Chat GPT, GPT4 & AI Text Checker Tool (zerogpt.com). The result: “Your Text is Human written 0% AI GPT*”
