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SEP / OCT 2026
Ghost in the machine
This issue brought a first for me. The original version of one of the feature articles here included this disclosure:“ AI tools assisted with outlining and language editing. The named author reviewed the source record, claims, citations and final manuscript and accepts responsibility for the submitted text.”
No, I’ m not saying which one. That doesn’ t matter. The key point for me was that the author thought it should be said. I imagine this is pretty common in academic journals. We did not have a policy on this because the issue had never arisen, so I had to think up one on the spot and decided we did not need to print one.
My reasoning was simply that they are redundant. The use of AI has become ubiquitous in recent years and plenty of other articles we have received have clearly used it without saying so. AI content reminds of the old saying about obscenity: impossible to define but you know it when you see it. A professional journalist can usually tell when AI has been used to write something. The‘ rule of three’, the constant‘ not only … but also’ sentences and a fondness for the em rule are all good indicators. And short staccato sentences. Often without a verb. Making one paragraph. Like this one. If you cannot tell what feature articles in this issue were created with the help of AI, I would be pleased to know it. I edit them not only for house style but also to make them more human in tone( Did you spot what I did just there?) and cover the traces of AI.
( Perhaps I should insert my own disclaimer at this point: None of this page or any other part of the magazine that I have always done was written with the use of AI. Though, come to think of it, feeding in a press release to Claude and telling it to come up with the key points in 200 words would be easy enough …)
Just like social media made( usually terrible) writers of us all, AI has the potential to make moderately competent writers of us all. Many people already cannot tell the difference between human and AI-generated content and many would not care anyway. Even if it cannot yet match the best human writing in any given context, AI may be good enough for most people most of the time.
I liken the process to what happened generations ago in pottery. Mass production created a mass market that satisfied most needs. This did not kill the craft pottery business; that is still there for those who are ready to pay a premium for authenticity.
Is the written word going to go the same way? I for one am certainly glad that I am nearer the end of a career in journalism than the beginning because it is hard to see what future lies ahead for us. With some exceptions, publishers gave up on trying to charge people for content many years ago.
Or could it go even further? The other thing about AI, as the term‘ machine learning’ implies, is that it can learn from mistakes. Who is to say that it will never be able to do what the most skilled of human writers do? As for when it is able to think in the same way as the human brain, I don’ t even want to go there.
Dr Andrew Warmington
EDITOR – SPECIALITY CHEMICALS MAGAZINE
SPECCHEMONLINE
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