Cluefishing

Clawfishing is simple to define and easy to miss in the wild: an AI-generated creation, or something built from an AI template, presented as if it came entirely from the person posting it. No disclosure, no credit to the tool, no indication that a prompt did some of the work.

It's not the AI use that's the issue. It's the silence around it. A drawing, a paragraph, a song, or a product photo made with AI assistance is fine to share; it's the implied claim, I made this myself, unaided, that turns ordinary tool use into something closer to plagiarism.

Cluefishing starts on the other side of that line: reading for the tell, and building the habit of disclosing before anyone has to ask.

Photographers have used EXIF metadata for decades to prove when and how an image was captured. The same idea is now being extended to AI content through standards like the C2PA content credentials effort, an industry coalition (Adobe, Microsoft, the BBC and others are publicly involved) building a way to attach a verifiable "how this was made" record to a file.

None of this requires trusting a single company's word. It just means provenance, the trail showing how something was made, is becoming a normal thing to check, the way you'd check a source on a news story. Asking for it isn't an accusation. It's due diligence.

Practically: keep your prompts, your drafts, and your source files. If someone asks how a piece was made, the honest answer should already be sitting in a folder somewhere.

1. Missing metadata. A photo with no camera information, or a document with no edit history, isn't proof of anything by itself, but it's worth a second look.

2. Suspiciously even rhythm. Human writing wobbles: sentence length varies, tangents creep in. Text that marches at the same pace for paragraphs can be a sign, not a certainty.

3. Stock transitions. Phrases that show up in almost every AI-drafted piece, moreover, it's important to note, in today's fast-paced world, aren't wrong on their own, but three of them in one paragraph is a pattern.

4. Confident errors. Clean grammar paired with a factual mistake a knowledgeable person wouldn't make is a classic tell.

5. Image artifacts. Garbled text in the background, extra or fused fingers, jewellery that doesn't quite close, lighting that doesn't agree with itself.

6. No visible process. A finished piece with zero sketches, drafts, outtakes, or revision history behind it, where the creator's usual work does show that trail.

One of these is a maybe. Two or three together are worth logging in the field notebook below.