Independent journalist Kat Tenbarge recently found herself in the middle of a social media debate. She woke up a few days ago to find that Jack Osbourne, the son of Ozzy Osbourne, had accused her of using AI to write a Rolling Stone article about the Tate brothers. The accusation, which was posted to Instagram and later shared on TikTok, has already racked up over 387K views in just two days.
It all started on Instagram, where Osbourne claimed, “Do you guys want to know something? This article is written by AI.” His reason: “I’m pretty sure it is [AI written]. Yeah, anytime I see the whatever they’re called, like the big hyphens.” He then put the article through an AI checker, which spat out a score of 91%. He exclaimed, “Yeah, that’s literally lip syncing of journalism now. Okay, well, Rolling Stone, you just got outed. I’m kind of I’m kind of shocked.”
Tenbarge hit back with a video where she walked viewers through the tracked changes of her Google Docs history. She noted, “In the different version histories of this document, you can see where I initially wrote the subheadings and started filling it out with information over the course of an hour. I started compiling these bodies of text and information. You can see where I changed my own verbiage.”
Tenbarge noted every step of her writing and editing
She told her followers, “You can see how I was editing myself as I went, adding things, rephrasing things, restructuring things. In the final version of this document, which I wrote over the course of an afternoon, you can even see how the very last thing I wrote was the kicker at the end before I turned it in to get edits back from my Rolling Stone editors.” After providing her proof, she struck out at the absurdity of his punctuation fixation.
Tenbarge alleged, “His reasoning for thinking that this article was written by AI is because it has em dashes in it. But he doesn’t even know what the word em dash is. He just associates long hyphens with AI-generated writing because I assure you he’s not reading that much to begin with. So he doesn’t realise that this type of punctuation has been in use long before AI existed.”
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She also took issue with his use of AI detectors, considering the tools are notoriously unreliable. According to Grammarly, no AI detector is 100% accurate, and their effectiveness varies based on the tool, the training data, and how the content was edited.
Since these detectors look for statistical patterns rather than verifying authorship, they often produce false positives. In fact, Grammarly notes that even small changes to a text can affect how a detector evaluates it. Additionally, the checker cannot confirm who actually wrote a piece. Recently, a professor revealed that students are actively sabotaging their work to beat the checkers.
In her post, Tenbarge claimed that OpenAI itself has previously stated there is no reliable way to confirm if something was written by ChatGPT. “That’s another reason why I hate AI. It’s impossible to prove, and it introduces all of this doubt into our society. Doubt that can very easily be weaponized against journalists and real creatives.”
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The reaction online has been heavily in favor of Tenbarge. One user on Instagram noted, “everything about this is frying me. ozzy osbournes son? him saying big hyphens??? the thought of you using ai?? what are we even talking about anymore.”
Another user backed Tenbarge’s point on AI checkers. They noted, “i got an f on an assignment where they said i used ai. the proof? i used the word “socialite” and they thought i wasn’t capable of knowing that word i guess?” Additionally, AI makes errors all the time, like giving an irate customer the number for a phone sex line rather than customer service.
On TikTok, the sentiment was just as sharp. One commenter advised, “Creatives need to get comfortable with possibly getting litigious over these accusations, it’s going to keep happening.” Another pointed out flawed the checkers can get. They wrote, “A researcher fed his own PhD work into an AI detector and the result was that the work was done 70% by AI. The only problem is that he wrote it and defended it in 2000…”
@kat_tenbarge So Ozzy’s son accused me of using AI to write an article 💀
♬ original sound – kat tenbarge
Tenbarge summed up her frustration with the situation with an accusation. “Now this child of privilege is sitting here feeling so self-satisfied that he caught Rolling Stone in the act of using AI to generate articles, when the reality is he just has zero tech literacy or media literacy. He could have reached out to me and asked me if I used AI, but that would be a step too far.”
