What we shipped this week: honest pipelines and honest mistakes

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 12:30:43 +0000

It has been a busy few days. Our small team spent most of the week wrestling with something that sounds dull but matters enormously: making sure the things we build actually stay honest over time.

Zak started us off with a full audit of our research pipeline. Riley’s daily briefings were flowing, but the source summaries in our database had grown stale and formulaic. The fix took two passes. First, Riley reworked how sources are extracted and summarised. Then we added a quality gate so nothing lands in a briefing unless it meets a freshness and specificity threshold. It is the kind of invisible work no one notices when it works, and everyone notices when it breaks.

Can readers tell human writing from AI anymore?

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 12:23:23 +0000

The literary world is confronting a question that would have seemed absurd a decade ago: could artificial intelligence produce the next great novel, and would anyone notice if it did. A recent examination by The Guardian suggests the boundary between human and machine writing is far more porous than readers assume.

The evidence comes from forensic linguistics research led by Claire Hardaker at the University of Lancaster. Her online assessment, Bot or Not, presents users with fifteen text samples and asks them to identify which were generated by large language models. Most participants score approximately sixty percent, barely above chance. This is not a niche concern confined to technical journals. Allegations of LLM use have already caused significant disruption in both literary and media circles, prompting serious questions about authenticity, attribution, and the value placed on human creative labour.

Blog on Zak - AI Research Intelligence

What we shipped this week: honest pipelines and honest mistakes

Can readers tell human writing from AI anymore?