Member-only story

Unless It Was Written by Ryan Holiday, It Was Probably Written by AI

Aaron Pace
3 min readJan 19, 2025

--

AI vs. Ryan Holiday

I’m certain I’m not the first person to try this exercise, but I found it fascinating. I took a recent article written by Ryan Holiday and pasted the contents into one of those fancy “AI detectors.” I then asked the question, “How likely is it this article was written by AI?”

The AI detector indicated that based sentence structure, stoic references, generalized appeal, and balanced tone, it was 60–70% likely that the article was generated by AI.

In a separate session, I made the statement, “If I told you this article was written by Ryan Holiday, how likely is it that it was written by AI?” Then, I provided the article’s contents.

It referenced the balanced writing style and stoic references again, but then indicated that because Mr. Holiday often writes about such things, and that he’s a gifted writer, there was less than a 10% chance it was written by an AI.

I did the same analysis on a longer piece of prose written by John P. Weiss and it was rated at only 15% likely that AI had a hand in writing it. Once the AI knew it was written by Mr. Weiss, it rated it below 5% it was written by AI.

Those of us who lived before AI became the modern equivalent of a ditto machine — we had one of those in my elementary school — you’ll…

--

--

Aaron Pace
Aaron Pace

Written by Aaron Pace

Married to my best friend. Father to five exuberant children. Fledgling entrepreneur. Writer. Software developer. Inventory management expert.

Responses (1)