How do we trust AI-generated text

Today I happened upon The Orange Cloud Report, via its mention from celld. Val Town uses a bunch of Cloudflare products in its stack, so this is of interest to me: a website that lists which Cloudflare products are the good ones, and which are beta-quality. Ever since AWS launched every conceivable product, it's been an open secret that some of them are very good, like S3, and some of them are just there to be AWS's entrant in a category. So: cool!

But, the website says it's "one operator's review" of every major product. And since I've become paranoid in this regard, I decided to run a bunch of the text through Pangram, the AI detector. It's 100% AI. Every paragraph, every word, every review.

But it's created by a real person, James Ross, who also writes a blog which is human-written. And the footer on the page says that they're personal opinions based on his own production experience. But the about page which speaks in the first person is fully AI-generated.

The author lives in the UK and is a native English speaker as far as I can tell. His human-typed writing is pretty good. He's probably not using LLMs as a translation layer.

Maybe he's using them to "polish" his writing and there's some unpolished writing behind the scenes? Or maybe it's all slop and the source material for all of the content is just a quick prompt. There's no way to tell the difference.

If it were written by a person, I'd come away with some trust in Ross's writing, maybe follow him to see what else he can share about Cloudflare so that I can steer clear of their weaker products. But it isn't, and the site with all of its honest genuine framing doesn't indicate that it's LLM-authored. Having read a few of its sections and then run Pangram on it, I felt both betrayed by the author and distrustful.

Your mileage may vary, I've learned time and time again that most people don't care about truthfulness and sourcing that much. Maybe it doesn't matter.

But if you want people to trust you, if the whole point is that you're sharing your personal experiences: why would you give people reasons to doubt you?