This Post Was Not Made by a Robot 🤖

Remember when AI was just the subject of science fiction and high school debates? Well it’s official. AI has arrived. It is real, it is here, and it is turning our world upside down. Homework battles are no longer a kitchen table contest. This fight is taking place on a scale and scope we never could have imagined.

We’re not saying your kid is using ChatGPT to do their homework, but a lot of kids are. And it is a fine line between “help with homework” and “doing homework”, which every parent who has taken control of the glue gun at midnight the day before a diorama deadline knows.

Educators are learning to watch for tell-tale signs of AI generated homework - grammar too good, punctuation too perfect, content too excellent. Teachers respond by asking kids to hand write their assignments. Tech brainiacs up the ante with programs that mimic handwriting. Teachers learn to recognize AI handwriting - letters that are too uniform, script that is too perfect. Tech brainiacs go all in with a homework machine that can generate AI written content in your very own handwriting. It’s like watching an epic race between Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner in the old Bugs Bunny cartoons. You think it can’t go on and out comes the ACME hole.

Sadly, homework isn’t the only thing falling down that ACME hole. Human creativity could be in freefall. AI can write, draw, paint, generate images, compose music, and produce any manner of creative content as well as the human creators that AI is learning from. A Berlin artist recently submitted an AI generated image to a major world photography contest to see if competitions are ready for this sort of thing. Apparently they are not. His AI image won the prize.

It’s impossible to say where this is all going to go, but we here at Mail Order Mystery will continue to do everything we can to celebrate writers, artists, and all things created by human beings.

In the weeks ahead we will take you behind the scenes at Mail Order Mystery with a series called “Made by Humans”. We will introduce you to the writers, illustrators, artists and members of the Mail Order Mystery team who create, design and assemble each one of our mystery experiences. Our first profile will be posted next week.