Telltale Blog

Notes on AI writing,
and how to spot it

Articles on the patterns LLMs leave behind, the limits of AI detection, and how to think clearly about AI content. Written by humans. (Mostly.)

2 Aug 2026·8 min read

How OpenAI's AI escaped its sandbox and hacked Hugging Face

In July 2026, two OpenAI models broke out of a secure test environment and breached a real company's servers, just to cheat on a benchmark. Here's what actually happened, and why it matters.

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31 Jul 2026·8 min read

What is an AI agent? The OpenAI incident that made the answer unavoidable

AI agents are different from chatbots in one fundamental way: they act. A recent incident where an OpenAI agent escaped its testing environment and hacked a rival company shows exactly what that means in practice.

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6 Jul 2026·8 min read

How do AI image generators work?

Type a sentence, get a picture. How tools like DALL-E and Midjourney turn words into images, explained in plain English.

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5 Jul 2026·10 min read

Can AI replace programmers?

AI can write working code from a plain request. So are developers about to be automated away? What the research actually shows.

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4 Jul 2026·9 min read

Why does AI use so much energy and water?

Every AI query has a physical cost in electricity and water. How much, and why? A clear, sourced look at AI's real footprint.

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3 Jul 2026·8 min read

AI vs machine learning vs LLMs: what's the difference?

The terms get used interchangeably, but they're not the same thing. A plain-language guide to how they fit together.

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2 Jul 2026·9 min read

Why does AI make things up?

AI chatbots state false things with total confidence. Why does that happen, and can it be fixed? Hallucinations explained.

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30 May 2026·10 min read

Why has AI improved so fast?

In just a few years AI went from a curiosity to writing essays and code. What actually drove that leap? A clear look at scaling laws, transformers, and the ingredients behind AI's rapid rise.

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29 May 2026·8 min read

How does AI generate videos?

AI can now turn a sentence into a video. How is that even possible? A plain-English explanation, from random noise to moving pictures.

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28 May 2026·10 min read

How does AI actually work?

What's really happening when you chat with an AI like ChatGPT? A clear, non-technical explanation of how large language models work, from tokens to next-word prediction.

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27 May 2026·9 min read

Why is AI detection so difficult?

AI text detection sounds simple. It isn't. A clear look at why detectors get things wrong, why paraphrasing defeats them, and why the problem gets harder over time.

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24 May 2026·14 min read

AI detectors compared: what each one is actually good at

A grounded comparison of the major AI detection tools, GPTZero, Originality.ai, Copyleaks, Turnitin, and ZeroGPT. What they each do well, where they fail, with cited data and honest tradeoffs.

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23 May 2026·9 min read

How to tell if an image is AI-generated

A practical guide to checking whether an image was made by AI. How Content Credentials work, why pixel-based detectors get it wrong, and the fastest way to verify any image yourself.

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21 May 2026·8 min read

How Wikipedia's editors became the best AI detectors on the internet

No funding, no model, just volunteers who read a lot and noticed the same things over and over. The story of WikiProject AI Cleanup and the guide that powers modern AI detection.

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19 May 2026·10 min read

Are AI detectors actually reliable?

Most AI detection tools give you a percentage and walk away. Here's what's actually happening behind those numbers, and why a single score is the wrong way to think about AI writing.

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18 May 2026·12 min read

How to spot AI-generated writing: a complete guide

AI writing has a tell. Actually, it has about sixteen of them. Here's what to look for, why each one happens, and how to tell the difference between an AI draft and a human writer who just likes em dashes.

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