NPR.

N-P-R.

Ned Hayes is a novelist. He's written eight books, and a few years ago, he was reading to a book group in Portland, Oregon.

Ned was narrating his novel he had labored over, the eagle tree.

And someone at the reading said, well, you know, I can probably push a button and create a novel this good.

I bet Ned wanted to push a button and have a trap door open.

But also to Ned, this didn't quite make sense.

Saying a chatbot could write a book

misses the point of art.

The fact that a writer spent several years

ideating on a book and thinking about it

and plotting and writing graphs

and throwing them away,

that's the love of writing and reading.

And when you're reading something,

you're reading that journey. You're reading for the backstory. So in a world of more and reading. And when you're reading something, you're reading that journey.

You're reading for the backstory. So in a world of more and more AI art, Ned wanted to know how

someone could prove to the world that they created their artworks themselves. This is the

indicator from Planet Money. I'm Darian Woods. And I'm Whalen Wong. Today on the show,

artists versus AI slop. We tell the story of how Ned Hayes took that comment from that reading

group and devised a way to help human artists stand out in a world of automated art.

To learn about tech standards, we can go back to the mid-1990s. Back then, the online community had a problem. A web developer would code a website, but they'd have to do it differently for each

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