It's come to this: Human certification in the age of AI slop

Summary

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Podcast Summary: The Indicator from Planet Money

Episode: "It's come to this: Human certification in the age of AI slop"

Date: May 20, 2026
Hosts: Darian Woods, Waylon Wong
Guest: Ned Hayes, Corin Tucker

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Overview

In this episode, The Indicator explores the rise of human certification in the creative world as a response to the proliferation of AI-generated art—what the hosts call "AI slop." Through the story of novelist and technologist Ned Hayes, the show discusses the origins and inner workings of the “Human Intelligence” label, a new system for certifying that a piece of art was truly made by a human. The episode features practical insights, skepticism, and lived experience from both artists and the podcast team as they attempt to certify their own work.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Origin of Human Certification (02:34–04:07)

• Ned Hayes’ Motivation: After a reader at a book group dismissed his years of effort by suggesting a novel of similar quality could be generated with the push of an AI button, Ned became concerned about how human effort and creativity would be valued.
  • Quote:

    “The fact that a writer spent several years ideating on a book and thinking about it and plotting and writing drafts and throwing them away. That’s the love of writing and reading... you’re reading for the backstory.”
    — Ned Hayes (00:42)

• Understanding the Importance of Standards: Ned’s past experience as an XML developer led him to see the value of standardization, sparking the idea for a “seal of humanness” analogous to organic or fair trade labels.
  • Quote:

  "It comes in a flash...I knew there was a standard that needed to be there."
  — Ned Hayes (03:38)

2. How ‘Human Intelligence’ Certification Works (04:07–07:23)

• Technical Approach:
  • Merely scanning for AI giveaways (like em-dashes) isn’t enough—what’s needed is proof of the messy, iterative human creative process.
  • The system requires artists to share drafts and document versions, leveraging metadata to track organic writing/revision patterns and spot suspiciously perfect copy-pasting.
    • Quote:

      "...Microsoft Word and Google Docs are watching you. That's right. They're surveilling every keystroke you're making."
      — Waylon Wong (04:32)

• Expansion to Other Arts: The method isn’t limited to writers. Game designers and filmmakers submit early drafts, design docs, or demo tracks to prove authentic creative labor.

3. Gaining Buy-In: Overcoming Skepticism (05:18–06:46)

• Initial Reception: Early outreach to artists met widespread skepticism—most dismissed AI art as “crap.”
  • Quote:

    “Early on, everybody said, oh, that AI stuff is crap. It’s not going to work, so we don’t care.”
    — Ned Hayes (05:18)

• The ‘AI Slop’ Threat:
  • Ned and the hosts point out that the general public and artists might not recognize just how fast AI-generated “slop” is flooding the market.
    • Memorable exchange:

      "Take a big whiff at AI slop."
      — Waylon Wong (05:42)

      "It's kind of like the smell of rancid aluminum foil."
      — Darian Woods (05:45)

4. Corin Tucker’s Experience: Certification in Action (06:01–07:23)

• Artist Testimonial: Corin Tucker (Sleater-Kinney) describes why certification matters to her as a musician.
  • Quote:

    "Artists care and...they want people to know the difference between, you know, using a computer to write your music or write your book. It’s a huge difference."
    — Corin Tucker (06:19)

• The Certification Process:
  • Artists prove their identity, attest under penalty of perjury, and submit working drafts and recordings, after which they can use the “H in a circle” logo.
  • Future works require submission of drafts and demos to get the certification for each.

5. Economic Implications: Do People Value Human Art? (07:23–08:36)

• Business Model: Artists pay a $20 fee for verification; the hope is that human-labeled art can earn a higher price.
• Consumer Willingness: Informal polling at a Planet Money live show found overwhelming support for paying less for AI-generated art and more for human-verified work.
  • Quote:

    "Put your hands up. If you would pay less for something if you learned that it was generated by AI, okay, pretty large, overwhelming, almost consensus."
    — Darian Woods (08:02)

6. Competition and The Burden on Artists (08:36–09:09)

• Certifying Bodies: Human Intelligence isn’t alone—the Authors Guild and others are developing rival certifications. It’s unclear whether one standard will emerge or if many will compete.
• Artist Burden: The time and cost of certification fall on creators, raising questions about equity and who benefits from the standard.

7. Testing the Process: Can the Podcast Pass as Human? (09:09–10:19)

• Planet Money Team Puts It to the Test:
  • The team submits all their drafts and audio to Human Intelligence, expressing nervousness and humor at “proving” they’re not robots.
    • Memorable moment:

      "I promise I am not a robot."
      — Waylon Wong (09:25)

      "If you yell loud enough. It couldn't possibly be AI."
      — Darian Woods (09:30)

  • After an anxious wait, the team receives confirmation: “We passed. We passed.” (10:17)
    • Quote:

      "The humans are fighting back."
      — Darian Woods (10:20)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Art as Human Endeavor:

  "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."
  — Ned Hayes (00:42)

• On Standardization:

  "It comes in a flash where I have the concept of the entire thing, from A to Z, from soup to nuts. And I knew there was a standard that needed to be there."
  — Ned Hayes (03:38)

• On the Smell of 'AI Slop':

  "It's kind of like the smell of rancid aluminum foil."
  — Darian Woods (05:45)

• On Fighting Back:

  "The humans are fighting back."
  — Darian Woods (10:20)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

| Segment Description | Timestamp | |-----------------------------------------------------|-----------------| | Ned Hayes origin story & artistic motivation | 00:11 – 01:08 | | From XML standardization to the idea for Human Cert | 02:34 – 03:48 | | How Human Intelligence works | 04:07 – 05:04 | | Recruiting artists and early skepticism | 05:18 – 06:01 | | Corin Tucker’s testimony and certification journey | 06:01 – 07:23 | | The market value of human versus AI art | 07:23 – 08:36 | | Rival certifications and artist burden | 08:36 – 09:09 | | Podcast team tests the certification process | 09:09 – 10:19 |

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Conclusion

This episode investigates the evolving tension between machine-generated and human-created works within the creative economy. Through the lens of Ned Hayes’ Human Intelligence initiative, the show documents both the practicalities and provocations of proving one’s artistic humanity in an age of AI slop—concluding on a (tongue-in-cheek) triumphant note: the humans, for now, have passed the test.

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Transcript

[Corin Tucker]

Npr.

[Darian Woods]

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'd laboured

[Ned Hayes]

over the eagle tree, and someone at the reading said, well, you know, I could probably push a button and create a novel this good.

[Waylon Wong]

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

[Judy Abrams]

I need that person.

[Waylon Wong]

But also to Ned, this didn't quite make sense. Saying a chatbot could write a book misses the point of art.

[Ned Hayes]

The fact that a writer spent several years ideating on a book and thinking about it and plotting and writing drafts 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.

[Darian Woods]

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.

[Waylon Wong]

And I'm Waylon 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.

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[Judy Abrams]

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[Darian Woods]

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 type of browser. One line to make a table, say for Netscape Navigator and another line for Internet Explorer. What the Internet needed was standards.

[Waylon Wong]

So A group called the World Wide Web Consortium got together and decreed the coding rule books that people should use. One of those early rulebooks was called xml, and one of the XML developers was Ned Hayes, the fiction writer.

[Ned Hayes]

The XML standard is used for all sorts of content and financial transactions today.

[Darian Woods]

Yeah, Ned is a bit of a renaissance man. Along with his writing, he's also worked at Adobe, at Microsoft, Microsoft and at Intel. And Ned saw up close how important it was to have a standard, a common language that everybody uses.

[Waylon Wong]

Fast forward to 2023. Ned is mulling over that comment in his reading group, and he has a spark of inspiration about standards and AI.

[Ned Hayes]

It comes in a flash where I have the concept of the entire thing, from A to Z, from soup to nuts. And I knew there was a standard that needed to be there.

[Waylon Wong]

The standard would be like a seal of humanness, like a fair trade label or an organic label. 100% human.

[Darian Woods]

Yeah. And like with XML, the checking process would be standardized. Every human artist would go through the same vetting, and every art consumer could trust the certification.

[Waylon Wong]

The first thing Ned did was build a team. Ned named the company Human Intelligence.

[Darian Woods]

Now, there are dozens of AI detectors out there. You know, they'll scan for those long dashes that chatbots love, EM dashes. They'll look for sentences that say, it's not X, it's Y, but they're not always reliable. So Ned knew his human certification system needed to go a level deeper. It needed to look at the artist's

[Waylon Wong]

drafts from his work with Microsoft. Ned knew that Microsoft Word and Google Docs are watching you. That's right. They're surveilling every keystroke you're making. So Ned's company built a system that looks into your original documents. It reads the metadata in your manuscript to see if there were any times when you, you know, suspiciously pasted 800 words of workmanlike yet beige prose into your story. Human Intelligence has a similar principle for other art, like game designers and filmmakers. Show us the drafts.

[Darian Woods]

And because Ned wanted this to be a standard, he was in this kind of Catch 22 to be widely accepted, he needed lots of users. And to have lots of users, he needed to be widely accepted. So Ned and his team went on a publicity spree.

[Ned Hayes]

We started going to book fairs, we started going to book readings. We started calling up all of our friends who were artists and writers and saying, what do you think of this? Do you think this is important? And early on, everybody said, oh, that AI stuff is crap. It's not going to work, so we don't care.

[Darian Woods]

But Ned could smell the AI slop nearing on the horizon. The artists maybe just didn't have refined enough nostrils to smell it coming.

[Waylon Wong]

Take a big whiff at AI slop.

[Darian Woods]

It's kind of like the smell of rancid aluminum foil.

[Waylon Wong]

Oh, I thought you were gonna say printer toner. I do like that smell.

[Darian Woods]

Yeah, maybe it's that too.

[Waylon Wong]

Anyway, through his writing circles, Ned managed to sign up someone fairly high profile.

[Corin Tucker]

My name is Corin Tucker, and I am a musician for the band Slater Kinney.

[Darian Woods]

Yeah, Slater Kinney, the feminist funk band most famous for this song, Modern Girl. When Ned asked if she wanted to verify herself as a human artist, Corrin said it was a no brainer.

[Corin Tucker]

Artists care and they, you know, they want people to know the difference between, you know, using a computer to write your music or write your book. It's a huge difference.

[Waylon Wong]

Corin sees Ned's work as part of a wider dialogue that needs to happen between artists and AI companies.

[Corin Tucker]

And if we don't have agency in this conversation, I think we'll be losing a lot of.

[Waylon Wong]

Corin thinks there's a big risk that a lot of art will be controlled by a small number of people in Silicon Valley.

[Darian Woods]

So Corin went through Ned's whole certification process. First she showed proof of her identity. Then, under penalty of perjury, she had to attest that she was a real human.

[Waylon Wong]

So then Corin got a little logo. She could use a capital H with a circle around it that verifies she's human. And now any new work would go through another process through human intelligence to confirm that it too is human. Made, like, for a new record, she could send photos of her scrawled lyrics, early demos, and the final mix. And then if Corin passes, she could print that capital H logo on that new album's cover.

[Darian Woods]

The business model is that the artist pays human intelligence to run the verification and keep the database of human verified works. The hope is that the H symbol means that the song or the novel could fetch a higher price.

[Waylon Wong]

And a little unscientific polling shows that a lot of people would pay more. Thank you so much. We at the show have been around the continent promoting the new Planet Money book. Well, we just wanted to say hello and welcome to the Planet Money live show. I'm Waylon Wong.

[Darian Woods]

And I'm Darian Woods.

[Waylon Wong]

Darian and I were in Toronto. We asked the audience what they think about all of this.

[Darian Woods]

Put your hands up. If you would pay less for something if you learned that it was generated by AI, okay, pretty large, overwhelming, almost consensus.

[Waylon Wong]

Yeah, there were a lot of hands up in the room and the artists are taking note. Ned says that all those artists who didn't think AI art would be much of a thing back in 2023 have now started to call him, asking how they can sign up. When Human Intelligence launched in late 2025, Ned had 5,000 artists signed up, and he expects that number to grow significantly.

[Darian Woods]

Now, we don't know if Human Intelligence's H symbol will be the standard. Like the Authors Guild has its own human authored certification. In fact, we don't even know if there will be a standard or just lots of companies verifying human made work.

[Waylon Wong]

Either way, artists are the ones bearing this cost, both in money and time to get the work verified. The current fee for human intelligence is $20.

[Darian Woods]

Yeah. So we wanted to go through the process ourselves and see how burdensome it might be for artists and see if we would pass Ned's test.

[Waylon Wong]

Ned got Human Intelligence's product lead at the time, Colette Alexander, to give us a zoom call.

[Judy Abrams]

We are talking today because I think we're going to verify that this Planet Money episode is made by humans.

[Darian Woods]

We promise we're not AI. Are you going to. I don't know if pleading is effective.

[Waylon Wong]

Wayland, did it work? You're like, I promise I am not a robot.

[Darian Woods]

If you yell loud enough. It couldn't possibly be AI.

[Waylon Wong]

Well, Colette had a different system. Let's just say she told us to send over all of our raw interviews and drafts as proof that we had had labored and rewritten and typed painstakingly to create the show.

[Darian Woods]

I don't know why I'm feeling nervous that I might not be human. My output's been suspiciously high and vanilla recently.

[Waylon Wong]

Oh, that beige. Yeah. Workman. Like pros.

[Darian Woods]

No, it hasn't. It's very unique.

[Waylon Wong]

So we email through our files all the raw interview audio and Google Docs. Over the next week, Human Intelligence combed through it, measured the speed of our script revisions, and then about a week later, we received an email saying, we failed. No, I'm just kidding. We passed. We passed.

[Corin Tucker]

We passed.

[Darian Woods]

Hooray. We are killed.

[Waylon Wong]

We did it.

[Darian Woods]

The humans are fighting back. This episode was produced by Julia Ritchie and Cher Vincent with engineering by Maggie Luther. It was fact checked by Sarah Juarez. Cait Concaten edits the show and the indicator is a production of npr.

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