Called a Machine and Read the Work
Shared from the Koher page:
Positions · Called a Machine · Read the Work · 4 October 2026
Koher published two positions on 4 October 2026. In both, a person is taken for a machine, and what they said or made stops counting.
Called a Machine takes its case from a set by the stand-up comedian Josh Johnson. He admits to calling a bot anyone whose message he would rather not take: a stranger online who makes a good point, someone from a dating app who stops replying, his mother texting to tell him why she is disappointed in him. Calling somebody a bot removes a person without answering them. The position finds the same habit in politics, where each side of a divide calls the voices against it bots or paid accounts. It takes no side in that divide. Koher’s positions, it says, hold against the habit only between two people who answer for what they say.
Read the Work finds the same thing in assessment. A mark can rest on a detector’s estimate of who wrote a piece, or on the same suspicion with no detector involved. Either way the judgement lands on the person, who has no way to answer it. The position reads the University Grants Commission’s regulations of July 2018 and Turnitin’s own guidance on its AI-writing score, and goes through the published tests of detectors. Koher builds no detector. Its tools read what the work says. Who made it is a question for the drafts kept while it was made, and for the person, who can be asked.
Called a Machine:
https://koher.app/position-called-a-machine
Read the Work:
https://koher.app/position-read-the-work