The Human Element: Why AI-Generated Content Is Killing Authenticity
They say AI is the future, but what they meant was Andy Intelligence.
As blog.zsec.uk is a blog primarily focused on my technical learnings, notes, and interests, I rarely post non-technical content unless I feel it really needs to be shared or it genuinely interests me.
So this post is more of a review of the state of things right now, if you subscribe to my blog for technical content, there are a few posts in progress that I'll get out soon enough!
One thing that I have noticed extensively in use, which we can't escape, is the use of AI for everything.
Questioning Creativity
Indeed, it's great for many things and it can help accelerate lots of learnings in lots of areas. However what it does do is removes a lot of human elements from creativity and more importantly, writing . One of my recent blog posts got chucked through an 'AI analyser' and turns out that because I'm dyslexic and I worked on that post for literally months(so there were elements that I rewrote multiple times to make sure it made sense to myself), my ramblings sound like they're 'AI-generated', which is interesting and saddening at the same time.
The fact that this probability checker reckons with medium certainty that my name is AI-generated makes me sad and sort of proves even the validity checkers can't always be trusted.
Don't get me wrong, AI is fine to assist creativity, but it shouldn’t replace it entirely.
Improving Our Approach
Please do better, less AI generated drivel, more properly written stuff by humans that isn't perfectly perfected or has random em and en dashes scattered throughout, emojis are fine, but they shouldn't replace bullet points and the rest of the tells that make up AI-generated writing.
As a dyslexic (I know I keep going on about it) I make an effort to perfect my language which involves reading and re-reading the content several hundred times to make sure it's correct, which is a reason why sometimes I have several blog posts on the go at any one time but they can take months or years to actually be released. More importantly that it makes sense to not just my jumbled mind but others too. There's a reason my first book took me nearly two years to write and still had spelling and grammar issues!
On the topic of writing things, I'm working on a course at the moment (you may have heard me mention it at some point), Malwareless Adversarial Emulation (MAE), and I could easily just get AI to write it all for me and be done inside a day, but where is the value in that, and where is the need for that?
By using AI, I'm not conveying my experience, AI would be regurgitating things that it has learnt from the scraping blogs of many (and probably at some point my own content too). With zero creativity or real-world experience in how these things apply, I feel that it is useless to many people without that insight and instead replace it with that robotic, perfected writing style with scattered random stuff throughout.
Learn and Improve
I'm all about lessons learnt while doing the job because it helps improve future learnings. Despite what people say, you can't use AI for everything. It isn't going to replace the creativity that adversarial-minded people have, and it is not able to reason with the why often. Yes, you can automate elements of our job, and pentesting is seeing that with Pentest as a Service (PTaaS) and similar offerings. However, the types of problems that need solving aren't always automatable. Instead, they require a degree of free will and critical thinking to solve and challenge assumptions..
AI will certainly replace the lazy testers out there, but that was always going to happen with automation in general, even before AI became so mainstream and prevalent. Again, you're still lacking the human element. When I write or teach or do my day job, I'm not just stepping through the motions or delivering information; I feel that the real value comes from understanding how systems are built and learning to spot the gaps that only experience can reveal.
Don't give in.
Why post all this? Well, sometimes it needs to be said, especially if you're starting out in the industry or have been doing this for a while: it is essential to understand what you're writing and not become dependent on our AI overlords.
I'll continue writing my imperfect, dyslexic ramblings, artisanally crafted posts that sometimes take months to complete. I'll keep sharing the fun thoughts and messy reality of what I've actually learned in the field and how these thoughts can help you uncover new ways of doing things, even if it doesn't sound as polished as what an AI could generate in seconds.
Because at the end of the day, you deserve content that comes from real experience, not algorithmic regurgitation. The human element isn't a bug, it's the entire point of creativity and writing.
As a side note, as well if you're interested in all my cover photos, they all come from pictures I've taken and most are hosted over at https://photos.zsec.uk,
