How to tell if something was written by AI
You’ve probably read something online and wondered: did a human write this, or did an AI? It’s a fair question, and one that’s getting harder to answer. AI-generated text has become increasingly fluent and natural, while detection methods remain imperfect. Still, there are real ways to spot AI writing, using both specialized tools and your own judgment.
Detecting AI-written content is possible, but it’s not foolproof. The best approach involves using multiple methods together rather than relying on any single solution.
Read more
What AI chatbots are bad at: When not to trust them
AI chatbots have gotten remarkably good at sounding confident. That’s part of the problem. They’ll write you a poem, explain quantum physics, or draft an email with such fluency that it’s easy to forget they’re not actually thinking—they’re pattern-matching at scale. When it comes to certain tasks, that matters enormously.
AI chatbots aren’t bad at everything. They’ve proven genuinely useful for brainstorming, drafting, explaining concepts, and working through ideas. The real problem is that their weaknesses aren’t obvious. They fail quietly and confidently, often in ways that feel plausible enough to slip past you.
Read more
What AI chatbots can actually help with: realistic use cases
AI chatbots have become remarkably useful tools, but the gap between what they can actually do and what people think they can do is still pretty wide. So let’s cut through the hype and talk about what you can realistically count on them for right now. These aren’t science fiction capabilities—they’re the things that work well enough today that they’ll save you time and mental energy.
Read more
What does 'training' an AI mean?
When we talk about “training” an AI, it’s easy to picture a digital student sitting in a classroom, absorbing facts from a textbook. But the reality is both more mechanical and more fascinating than that. At its heart, training an AI is about teaching a massive mathematical model to recognize patterns in information so it can predict what should come next.
Whether it’s the latest ChatGPT model from OpenAI, Anthropic’s Claude, or Google’s Gemini, every frontier model goes through a rigorous, multi-stage process before it ever sees a user prompt. Understanding this process helps explain why these models are so capable, but also why they sometimes struggle with simple facts.
Read more
What does it mean when an AI is open source vs. closed?
When you start looking into the world of artificial intelligence, you’ll quickly run into two camps: the “open” crowd and the “closed” crowd. Companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google generally keep their most powerful models behind a digital curtain, while others like Meta and DeepSeek release models that anyone can download and run.
At its simplest, this debate is about who gets to see how the engine works and who is allowed to drive the car. But the lines have blurred, and a new term—“open weight”—has become just as important for understanding how your favorite AI tools actually function.
Read more