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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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Date: May 20, 2026
Hosts: Darian Woods, Waylon Wong
Guest: Ned Hayes, Corin Tucker
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.
“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)
"It comes in a flash...I knew there was a standard that needed to be there."
— Ned Hayes (03:38)
"...Microsoft Word and Google Docs are watching you. That's right. They're surveilling every keystroke you're making."
— Waylon Wong (04:32)
“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)
"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)
"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)
"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)
"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)
"The humans are fighting back."
— Darian Woods (10:20)
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)
| 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 |
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.