In Edgar Allan Poe’s chilling story, The Tell-tale Heart, we meet an unreliable narrator.
He tells us he is sane, but he is nervous and fidgety. As the story unfolds, we realize he has good reason to be nervous. As it turns out, he is the murderer, having hidden his victim’s body under the floorboards. The police arrives and he believes he has gotten away with it. But the crime comes to light with a strange piece of evidence – when he seemingly starts hearing the tell-tale heart of the dead man, beating louder and louder, through the floorboards, until he can bear it no more. Conscience? Trick of the mind? Poe wisely lets us, the reader, figure it out.
Let me now take you to the scene of a new crime. Today’s unreliable narrator meets us in a case of a suspected murder, one that’s been repeating ad nauseum over the last few months.
The potential victim: original thought.
Let’s line up the two most culpable culprits.
Suspect 1: My LLM is better than your LLM:
Send them an in-depth strategic output with original choices on how the business can grow, they’ll send you a detailed critique that’s spoilt for choices, a document clearly generated by AI. There are no actual changes or decisions. But hey, with AI at their fingertips who’s to stop them from spreading their power.
Suspect 2: Not X but Y:
Spotted here are the tell-tale signs of each signature LLM. The bold claims of one, the negative framing of another, the perfect saccharine sameness of all. And what’s lost in that sameness is the sheer joy of the readers’ surprise. An insight, a graphic, a sentence that just makes one stop in wonder, and read on.
Many tokens, much AI slopping, slop detection sleuthing and invisible watermarks later, we are at a new point today in this investigation.
Customers we work with today share that AI-ness needs be at less than 1% of a written document. Pitches created in a jiffy with thinking outsourced to AI prompts are no longer as welcome in board room discussions.
This is a murder that could not happen. Because the tell-tale heart of good old storytelling is beating again. Loud. Human. Alive. What keeps it beating? You decide.
At stotio, we help brands turn original thinking into stories that make people stop, think and remember. If you have something worth saying, let’s make sure it does not sound like everyone else.