Feels Like AI? Introducing Brath, a New Model by Fíor

A few months ago I wrote about why I built Fíor. It was a piece about my concerns. The internet I grew up with felt like it was being quietly swapped out for something else, and I wanted some small way of knowing who was actually talking to me.

Since then, we've learned a lot about what really matters to people. Fíor now runs on a new model called Brath. Brath is the Irish word for feeling or sensing. This article is about where it came from.

The old model was right but didn't understand people

The old model was trained for one job. It read an article and gave you a probability that it was written by a person or by AI. It was trained on large datasets of both, and it was good at telling them apart.

It was also harsh. If an article showed elements of AI, it leaned very much in that direction. Someone who conceived an article entirely themselves, then ran it through a tool to tidy the grammar, could come out looking like a machine if they let the AI adapt their writing too much.

The reality is people are getting used to AI as an editor. Used properly, it isn't the worst thing in the world. A model that punished anyone who touched AI might be accurate, but it isn't pragmatic, and it isn't pointed at the real problem.

Focus on the feeling

In my first article I focused a lot on the Dead Internet Theory, the idea that most of what you see online is bots talking to bots. I've come to think of it less as something to prove true or false, and more as a prophecy. It isn't a description of the internet now. It's a warning about where it ends up if nothing changes.

What kills internet communities isn't AI. It's slop.

Slop is the post nobody took the time to think through. Slop is the article nobody challenged themselves to write. Slop is the content where someone just hit play and let it rip. People stop engaging because nobody made the effort to engage them. That's slop.

You can feel it when you read it or see it. And that's the part the old model didn't focus on.

People have argued that art is technique delivered with some feeling of authenticity. You can debate whether the feeling has to be real, but for the person reading, the feeling is what lands. If a piece of writing feels hollow, it doesn't matter who typed it.

What Brath does

Brath still tells you who it thinks wrote an article, a person or AI. That prediction hasn't gone anywhere.

But it also tells you how the article reads, like a human or like AI. And when it spots the habits that make writing feel machine-made, it names them.

These two predictions don't always agree, and that's okay. An article can be written with heavy help from AI and still read as human, because someone took the trouble to make it say something authentic. It can go the other way too. A person can write something that reads like it came off a production line. That's rare, but it does happen.

You can try Brath two ways. The browser extension checks the article you're reading. The Playground on getfior.com lets you paste in any text and see both answers, along with any flags.

This new model is still a prediction, not a verdict, but I think it's a much more useful one. It goes after lazy content instead of punishing everybody who has used an AI grammar tool.

Spotlight on the news

Fíor is still focused on news and journalism, and that's deliberate. Journalism is one of the few tools we have to reliably speak truth to power.

It's Woodward and Bernstein following the money until a president resigned. It's the hundreds of reporters behind the Panama Papers, who worked in secret for more than a year until they could prove what was in 11.5 million leaked documents. It's Veronica Guerin, in my home country of Ireland, who kept writing about Dublin's drug gangs until they killed her.

None of that is slop. It took people who cared enough to take the risk, and that kind of work still has the power to free people. If the internet fills up with writing nobody bothered over, that's the work that gets drowned out.

Brath is our attempt to give readers a way to hear the difference. I still don't know if Fíor is the right tool, but I'm more sure than ever that it's the right problem.

You can try the Fíor browser extension or the Playground at Fíor. Setting up an account is free.