I finally did it. I used artificial intelligence to help me write a weekly column. It happened because my new Christmas computer from Mrs. Word Guy came complete with the AI feature (Google calls their version Gemini) already installed. Curious about the answer I’d get, I asked it to write a short essay about the history of some of the cliches we Americans frequently use.

The resulting piece seemed to handle the origins of some of our more common cliches pretty well. For instance, it said that the term “cool” originally described someone who was cool under pressure. It also explained that the friendly term “dude” had evolved from “dandy,” a slightly derogatory word for a man who might have taken a little too much care about the way he dressed.

The one AI-generated term I had a problem with was “bail” when it’s being used to mean that someone has to leave quickly (as in “I gotta bail, see you guys later.”) Gemini suggested the term probably started about 50 years ago and was based on the act of bailing water out of a boat.

I contend that when it applies to the act of a person leaving someplace quickly, it could very well have originated earlier in the last century when flyers frequently found it necessary to parachute (“bail out”) out of a failing airplane as quickly as possible.

Overall, I’d call the essay AI churned out to be pretty good. Maybe even very good when I was compare its offering to the writings recently produced by my elementary school students on their new iPads.

While their writing may not be on par with anything that AI can come up with, those kiddos possess computer skills that easily leave yours truly in the dust. Naturally this leads me to wondering about their ability to “borrow” the work of someone (or something) else in spite of their teachers’ dire warnings about the consequences of plagiarism.

Merriam-Webster defines “plagiarize” as “to steal and pass off the ideas or words of another as one’s own; use another’s production without crediting the source.” But does it apply to borrowing content created by a machine?

“This definition (of plagiarism) fits AI-created content well,” says David Gewirtz, senior contributing editor at ZDnet.com. “While someone using an AI tool like Notion AI or ChatGPT isn’t stealing content, if that person doesn’t credit the words as coming from an AI and claims them as their own, it still meets the dictionary definition of plagiarism.”

And as many college students learned the hard way – before all this new technology trickled down to the younger ones – the folks who are smart enough to create the new tech are also smart enough to create many new ways to detect it. QuillBot, Turnitin, Copyleaks, GPTZero and its confusingly named rival, ZeroGPT are only a few of the myriad ways out there to detect AI plagiarism. In an interesting aside, Gewirtz points out that “writing from non-native speakers often gets rated (by AI detectors) as generated by an AI.”

In closing I want to assure you that the only AI involved in the writing of this piece was the 600-word essay I requested on “the history and etymology of common American slang.” After reading the piece I deleted it and proceeded to write this column the way I usually do: sitting at the kitchen table, hunting and pecking on my little (new) laptop.

Jim Witherell: Jim Witherell of Lewiston is a writer and lover of words whose work includes “L.L. Bean: The Man and His Company” and “Ed Muskie: Made in Maine.” He can be reached at [email protected].