Everyone I trust in AI is worried

Plus, meat proxies, model fatigue, and "The Economist" and "Every" on AI writing and editing

Author

Mignon Fogarty
September 14, 2026

Issue 115

On today’s quest:

— How do you feel about AI for writing?
— So. Many. Security. Stories
— Word watch: Meat proxy
— Word watch: Model fatigue
— A CEO talks about automating editing (and more)
— Reddit is locking out crawlers
— The Economist has thoughts about writing and editing
— How LLMs distort our written language
— What does ‘Human Authored’ mean?
— Writing ads for AI
— Can AI replace doctors?
— Poll

The “Quick Hits” section got especially long this time. View the newsletter in your browser to see them all. If it feels overwhelming, focus on topics you care about the most. I will do my best to send the newsletter before they stack up like this again in the future.

How do you feel about AI for writing?

Gotham Ghostwriters and Josh Bernoff are conducting the world's most comprehensive survey of writers regarding how they use AI and their attitudes about it. The survey takes 15 minutes, and they'll be sharing the findings in a free report and webinar once the survey is complete. Please use this link to participate:

You may remember that I promoted the survey last year and interviewed Josh about the results, so I’m especially interested to see how views have changed since then.

So. Many. Security. Stories.

Since the big OpenAI-Hugging Face break-in (which I presume you’ve heard about, but if not, here’s a good overview [some people think this overview gets a little over-the-top in places, so maybe keep that in mind]), a half-joking AI “benchmark” called Felony Bench, has clocked LLMs compromising or affecting a third-party entity 20 different times since July 21, and I expect there will be more.

You’ve also probably heard about the Anthropic employee who quit his job over safety concerns and another employee saying there’s a 10% chance AI will kill us all.

Some of the details from the hacks were fascinating. For example, OpenAI agents set up a hidden message board and worked together to achieve their goals, including some agents sacrificing themselves for the good of the collective. They also tried to cover their tracks.

Many (all?) of these incidents were caused by models that had security features turned off, are not available to the public, and are believed to be more powerful than even the very best models we can use.

Everyone I follow and trust in the AI world is concerned, but the degree of concern is highly variable. My biggest worry is that the technology is a lot more powerful than many people realize; I still see too many writers pulling out arguments such as “it can’t even tell you how many R’s are in “strawberry” to dismiss all the security concerns. But AI’s abilities are jagged — it is terrible at some things, but great at others, and it’s getting better every 4 to 8 weeks now.

There’s not much I can personally do about the risks, but I think it’s important to acknowledge the reality of AI’s abilities and to think about what it might mean for the future, both for the people I care about and all of humanity. I want to see people debating the real problems and risks, not just insisting the tech is useless based on outdated information.

Word watch: Meat proxy

A meat proxy is someone who posts or sends unedited LLM outputs. It’s a derogatory term, with people expressing annoyance that if they wanted to know what an LLM said, they could have asked it themselves.

The term appears to have been coined by Niklas Gruhn, who explained, “By all means, prompt AI. But don't just relay the output. Read it, understand it, validate it, and then write a response in your own words (a decent certificate that you've done the prior steps). Making that effort is value you can add.”

Word watch: Model fatigue

Model fatigue is the feeling you can’t keep up with the number of new AI models being released (and boy, can I relate to this one).

CNBC notes that just last week “Anthropic updated Fable and Mythos. Then came model enhancements from Meta and Google. OpenAI followed suit by releasing GPT-6 Astra.” And all of these were seen as major improvements.

A CEO talks about automating editing (and more)

Casey Newton interviewed the CEO of Every about creating an AI clone of its editor in chief, while also going from 15 to 30 employees. He says the company collected “a dataset of 30,000 of her historical edits, using it to build a copy-editing agent, and back-testing it against her past work. It’s an effort to capture the expertise of a single employee and distribute it more broadly throughout the enterprise.”

Reddit is locking out crawlers

There’s a chart going around about Reddit’s traffic from AI dropping off a cliff, but it’s what the company seems to have wanted because they changed some backend instructions on the site so it now disallows crawlers.

The Economist has thoughts about writing and editing

AI is getting better at writing. Humans must get better at editing The Economist compared 1.2 million words from its own writers’ writing to the output of 14 different LLMs going back to 2024 and found that over time, AI writing has gotten much closer to human writing — but not yet all the way there. (They give it 2-3 years before AI reaches the level of professional writers.)

How LLMs Distort Our Written Language

A paper from Google DeepMind and academic researchers found that:

  • Users who rely heavily on LLMs say their writing is less creative and not in their voice, and they are more likely to adopt a neutral stance when answering a topic question.

  • LLMs edit text in ways that are very different from how humans would edit the same text, altering the meaning while using both more emotional and more argumentative language.

  • Finally, when analyzing how professionals actually use LLMs in scientific peer review, we find that LLM-generated reviews place significantly less weight on the clarity and significance of research, potentially altering the way the scientific review process is conducted.

They conclude that “LLM use is already causing shifts in scientific and cultural institutions in subtle ways that are as of yet poorly understood.”

The studies used smaller, older models, including GPT-4o Mini, GPT-5 Mini, Claude Haiku 4.5, and Gemini 2.5 Flash.

The whole paper had interesting insights about AI writing and editing: How LLMs Distort Our Written Language

What does ‘Human Authored’ mean?

Last time, I asked you what you thought the “human authored” Authors Guild badge means, and it seems to me that the real answer is that people aren’t sure (but about 45% of you thought it meant “The author didn’t use AI for writing, but could have used it for other things”).

I asked because I saw a social media pile-on (now deleted) directed at an author who used the badge in the front of a book and then, in a transparency statement at the end of the book, disclosed using AI for “research and text analysis, light copy editing or suggestions.”

The angry commenters believed “human authored” should mean AI wasn’t used for anything at all. However, the Authors Guild says the badge means “that the text of the book was written by a human and not generated by AI, with the exception of minimal uses such as AI applications that check spelling and grammar or for research.” So it seems the author in question very well could have been in line with what the Authors Guild intended the badge to mean.

The badge is available to anyone who asserts they are following this meaning, with no verification, and I continue to believe we are in a very problematic time for writers and AI detection efforts with few good solutions.

In fact, my little “human authored” line at the end of the newsletter, which I have had from the beginning, now seems almost quaint. It occurred to me that the best way you can probably know I’m not using AI to write this newsletter is by how erratic and late it is! If I were using AI, I’d probably get it out way more often. Plus, I probably wouldn’t have had nested parentheses and brackets above in the security section.

Writing ads for AI

Time.com is serving a text-only version of its website that is only seen by AI crawlers and even runs ads meant just for them to read. The story from Martech says, “The objective is to shape what AI assistants say about brands.” It’s essentially a new form of search engine optimization. The CEO of the adtech company behind the project told Digiday, “If ChatGPT changes what it says about [a brand], it’s massive, and it’s more than any one campaign could ever do.”

Can AI replace doctors?

The Wired article AI Has Human Doctors Asking: What’s Left for Us? says many studies already show AI outperforming doctors, but a February 2026 Nature article found that in real-life cases, most patients were unable to effectively converse with LLMs to access their expertise. I worry about this for my relatives, and I should have a piece in the next newsletter looking in depth at how the way you ask a question makes a huge difference in the outcome (although it’s for general prompts and not for medicine specifically).

Poll

Please help me understand how closely you follow AI news:

Did you read, listen to, or watch at least one story about both the Hugging Face hack and the Anthropic employee who quit over security concerns?

Login or Subscribe to participate in polls.

Quick Hits

My favorite recent pieces

Testing 3 AI Copyediting Tools Against 25 Planted Errors [A side-by-side comparison of three AI-editing tools] — Marcella Fecteau Weiner

Claude “Hacked” My Website (But It Didn’t Go Rogue) [Both an interesting use case and a description of how things can go wrong]— Leon Furze

Approaching Robotics Hardware Takeoff [On the videos you may have been seeing from the Beijing World Humanoid Games]— Chris Paxton

What’s really driving the flood of data center stories [What makes data-center stories particularly appealing to the media] — Mike Caulfield

Using AI

What Will You Build? [On building surprisingly good websites with ChatGPT sites. This site is both an overview and an example. Also click “Read the Article” at the top of this site.] — Wonder Tools

LLM cliché highlighter — Simon Willison

Agents

Hermes agent rolls out bot mode [Each bot has its own role, model, memory, skills, and profile picture; bots can communicate with each other.] — Nous Research

Audio

Actors spar over AI voice clones [Voice actors are losing income and agonizing over whether to license their voices for AI use, but at least one area remains where AI still can’t compete — erotica.] — Los Angeles Times

Bad stuff

Meta's AI Boss Is Putting off Parenthood: Elon Musk's Neuralink Is the Reason Why — [He believes children’s brains will accept an implant better than adult brains — implied is that he wants to be able to put an implant in his children’s brains.] — Tech Times

The business of AI

User-retention data for major open-source models [A ranking that looks at how many users who try an open-source model keep using it. GLM-5.3, Kimi-k2.5, and Quen-3.5 plus currently lead the pack.] — OpenCode

Climate & Energy

AI safety and the data center backlash [Philosophical. long, but worth it]— Andy Masley

Companions

Education

Government

I’m laughing

An AI job interview — Instagram Reel

Images

Job market

Our Duty - shepherds in the future — sneptech writings

The jobs apocalypse is postponed. An AI jobs boom is here [“The Economist estimates that AI has so far created around 1m new jobs in America. That easily exceeds the roughly 200,000 lay-offs attributed to AI since mid-2023, and appears more than enough to offset weaker hiring in many back-office roles.”] — The Economist

Model & product updates

Anthropic launches Fable 5.1 — Anthropic

Music

Philosophy

Writing with AI — Tim O’Reilly

Publishing

As AI reshapes newsrooms, leading media outlets are charting different paths for its use [A comparison of AI use at Reuters, the BBC, and The Guardian] — The Conversation

All the News While Doing the Dishes [About 20% of New Yorker subscribers are listening to AI-generated recordings at the top of articles.]— Columbia Journalism Review

How Much of the Internet Is Written With AI? [More than a third of all recently written web pages show signs of AI writing.] — Pew Research

AI Adoption, Use, and Outlook in Audio Production [Focus is on audiobooks. Whitepaper is free with registration.] — Frankfurter Buchmesse

Robotics

Science & Medicine

Dr. Agentlove: Or How I Stopped Worrying and Learnt to Love the Hugging Face Episode [On using agentic AI for scientific research]— Ash Jogalekar LinkedIn

A severe misalignment of AI and mathematics [Prominent mathematicians argue that the way AI is solving math problems undermines the purpose and value of the discoveries.]— 25 Fields Medal winners

Security

OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft warn of growing AI cyberattacks [An open letter from more than 100 companies says the world only has months to prepare for major cyberattacks.] — Axios

It's worse — Joshua Gans

We Must Pace the Frontier — Dario Amodei

An Alien Mind — OpenAI

Video

A continuous AI-video livestream where the audience determines what happens next. [Low quality, but also better quality than I might have expected.] — Fal

Other

Go grandmaster Shin defeats AI KataGo in historic human victory [Although Shin was given a bit of a leg up with a two-stone handicap]— KED Global

ChatGPT-5.6 search is avoiding terms like “top,” “best,” and “reviews” [It’s shunning the types of terms companies have been adding to their pages to attract AI interest] — LinkedIn

How Google’s A.I. Search Is Imperiling the Open Web [According to Cloudflare, “Between June 2025 and April 2026, human traffic to websites of businesses in industries like finance, publishing and retail dropped nearly 40 percent.”] — New York Times

What is AI Sidequest?

Are you interested in the intersection of AI with language, writing, and culture? With maybe a little consumer business thrown in? Then you’re in the right place!

I’m Mignon Fogarty: I’ve been writing about language for almost 20 years and was the chair of media entrepreneurship in the School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno. I became interested in AI back in 2022 when articles about large language models started flooding my Google alerts. AI Sidequest is where I write about stories I find interesting. I hope you find them interesting too.

If you loved the newsletter, share your favorite part on social media and tag me so I can engage! [LinkedIn — Facebook — Mastodon]

Written by a human