Is the true measure of AI-written content the MEGO test?

Our eyes are precious things, and they are also smart ones. I know they only transmit images--it's the brain that interprets--so maybe it's the combination that I'm talking about here. 

One of the tasks I'm doing right now requires a lot of concentration and is visually intensive (intense?).  I try to stop for breaks at intervals, but sometimes my eyes can't make it till the next break, so they get blurry and tears run down my cheeks. That's when I stop for the day. But as Laura Ingalls Wilder says about housework when she's pregnant in The First Four Years, "the work must go on, and she was the one who must do it," so I press on, but sometimes my eyes just plain close. 

So eye time is precious time, and I don't want to waste it unnecessarily. Necessary time-wasting: looking at pictures of old houses or gardens or something equally soothing. 

Unnecessary time-wasting: AI-written text.

We're probably all seeing the evidence of AI-written text on the web--wildly inaccurate howlers passing as "facts," weird word usages, etc. Are we reading it in the same way as human-generated writing, though?

Oddly enough, when I read an AI-cheerleading piece like the one at IHE now, or my students' AI-written work, my eyes have started to skim rapidly and, in fact, they glaze over. Is it because the text is generated by AI, or is it because it's not saying much?

That skimming effect, though--that's the MEGO test, from a term coined in (maybe) 1973, according to the New York Times. (I canceled my subscription, so I can't read it and tell you for sure.) 

 MEGO stands for My Eyes Glazed Over, and it's a reaction to boring, obvious text. From the article: "A true MEGO, however, is more than a soporific piece; it is an article written about a subject of great importance which resists reader interest."

Of course, other forms of text have failed the MEGO test before--AI in its current form didn't exist in 1973--but maybe AI has trained our brains to spot it. 

You scientists out there know that this can't be a real effect and I can't be totally serious, but it's a thought experiment that's giving my eyes a little break before going back to the Big Task, 

 

The tradwives of Stepford

 Because I'm habitually late to the party with social trends, I'm only now catching up to the tradwife phenomenon. According to the NYTimes, the New Yorker, etc., a tradwife performs the traditional gender role of being a housewife, now "new & improved" with a heavy dose of white Christian nationalism. 

I say "performs" because they seem to be mostly rich influencers who make a fetish out of tasks that many of us (raises hand) have been doing forever--baking bread, cooking from scratch, taking care of children etc. These performances are apparently for the benefit of people who have the leisure and money and interest to spend time on TikTok and social media sites (lowers hand). 

The Reddit posts collected at BoredPanda provide a sobering counternarrative from women who lived this life a generation or two ago, and a lot of them focus on what seems the most obvious downside: without a way to make a living, what happens to the tradwife if the lord and master or whatever he's called loses his job, or is unable to work, or decides to take off with his secretary and abandon the family?

I thought the #1 lesson of feminism--and, oddly, of capitalism--is that without economic power you have no power. In fact, Ira Levin wrote a whole satirical horror novel about this, The Stepford Wives, which poses the question "what if men could have their wife fantasies fulfilled by replacing human women with robots?" The answer is, predictably, that men say "yes, please," and set about creating this utopia (which would include rollbacks in feminism, reproductive freedom, women working, and the rest) for a deeply bleak ending for women. (By the way, the original Katherine Ross movie was reasonably faithful to the book; the Nicole Kidman one was a mess that slapped on a happy ending.)

Levin was talking about what men would do, though. Why would women volunteer to be handmaidens/tradwives? I get why the influencers do it: there is not enough attention in the world, nor enough clicks, nor enough money, ever to fill that gaping void in their souls. But why would women sign up to have their rights curtailed more than they already have been in 2024?