Book of Daze: AI Disclosure Day

AI Disclosure Day began two years ago in a Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, office park, when a mid-level compliance officer noticed that four consecutive “personal” emails from a coworker used the phrase “I hope this finds you well” followed by a semicolon-heavy bullet list.

He filed an internal grievance claiming the personal emails had actually been AI-written. It was flagged as AI-written itself. Nobody has fully recovered.

Marcy Boddington, 41, a dental billing coordinator from Reading, Pennsylvania, has become AI disclosure day’s unofficial spokesperson.

“You can tell AI writing easily,” she says. “A real person would never use the word ‘delve’ three times before lunch.”

Marcy keeps a laminated card at her desk listing other AI tells: unearned enthusiasm about quarterly synergy, em dashes deployed like punctuation seasoning, and any sentence that ends with “let me know if you’d like me to adjust the tone.”

Her AI disclosure day observation is simple — a single red asterisk placed at the bottom of any email she did not fully write herself, a gesture she calls “showing your work.”

Not everyone complies, however. Gary Thistlewood, 58, an HVAC parts distributor who still types two spaces after every period, has developed what he calls “de-botting” techniques: inserting a typo on purpose, ending with “anyway, hope work’s not too crazy,” and removing exactly one Oxford comma per paragraph.

“It’s about texture,” he explains. “AI doesn’t do texture.”

Local sentiment remains divided on whether AI disclosure day is itself satire generated by a chatbot pretending to understand irony, a possibility nobody has ruled out, least of all the person who wrote this.

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