#AI shit

[porcupine-girl]

An important message to college students: Why you shouldn't use ChatGPT or other "AI" to write papers.

Here's the thing: Unlike plagiarism, where I can always find the exact source a student used, it's difficult to impossible to prove that a student used ChatGPT to write their paper. Which means I have to grade it as though the student wrote it.

So if your professor can't prove it, why shouldn't you use it?

Well, first off, it doesn't write good papers. Grading them as if the student did write it themself, so far I've given GPT-enhanced papers two Ds and an F.

If you're unlucky enough to get a professor like me, they've designed their assignments to be hard to plagiarize, which means they'll also be hard to get "AI" to write well. To get a good paper out of ChatGPT for my class, you'd have to write a prompt that's so long, with so many specifics, that you might as well just write the paper yourself.

ChatGPT absolutely loves to make broad, vague statements about, for example, what topics a book covers. Sadly for my students, I ask for specific examples from the book, and it's not so good at that. Nor is it good at explaining exactly why that example is connected to a concept from class. To get a good paper out of it, you'd have to have already identified the concepts you want to discuss and the relevant examples, and quite honestly if you can do that it'll be easier to write your own paper than to coax ChatGPT to write a decent paper.

The second reason you shouldn't do it?

IT WILL PUT YOUR PROFESSOR IN A REALLY FUCKING BAD MOOD. WHEN I'M IN A BAD MOOD I AM NOT GOING TO BE GENEROUS WITH MY GRADING.

I can't prove it's written by ChatGPT, but I can tell. It does not write like a college freshman. It writes like a professional copywriter churning out articles for a content farm. And much like a large language model, the more papers written by it I see, the better I get at identifying it, because it turns out there are certain phrases it really, really likes using.

Once I think you're using ChatGPT I will be extremely annoyed while I grade your paper. I will grade it as if you wrote it, but I will not grade it generously. I will not give you the benefit of the doubt if I'm not sure whether you understood a concept or not. I will not squint and try to understand how you thought two things are connected that I do not think are connected.

Moreover, I will continue to not feel generous when calculating your final grade for the class. Usually, if someone has been coming to class regularly all semester, turned things in on time, etc, then I might be willing to give them a tiny bit of help - round a 79.3% up to a B-, say. If you get a 79.3%, you will get your C+ and you'd better be thankful for it, because if you try to complain or claim you weren't using AI, I'll be letting the college's academic disciplinary committee decide what grade you should get.

Eventually my school will probably write actual guidelines for me to follow when I suspect use of AI, but for now, it's the wild west and it is in your best interest to avoid a showdown with me.

[the960writers]

It's hilarious how nanowrimo fails at understanding what their event is about. Thinking that writing is about filling pages with a certain number of words is a misconception about what writing actually is, one you usually only see from techbros.

But here they are, from the event of writing a story in 30 days, telling you that you can just prompt a generative AI and let it spit out 50k in a few seconds and that is somehow just like writing 🤦‍♀️

[barbex]

[greencheekconure27]

It was more of a texture/colour/lightning thing that immediately tipped me off. I can't explain it because it's a Lot of visual data interpreted in seconds before I switched my brains on but it's just. Visually off in a very specific way I often see in AI videos . The contours are too sharp, the contrast and saturation too high, light/shading feels just ever so slightly out of place. The movements, too-the lack of grimacing, as mentioned above, but also they're just too smooth and thought out beforehand, more like someone's platonic ideal of how a lion would move rather than how an animal actually moves.

Another thing -look at the background. Those trees look painted on. Several seem to float above the ground (e.g. upper left corner.) The length and texture of the grass changes several times, as does the angle. (Why would the camera person move around so much and risk spooking the animals if the first position was good?) This theoretically Could be the same lions filmed in different locations repeating the behaviour, but I suspect there's so many cuts because the AI can't keep the background consistent.(AI tends to be absolutely shit at plants in my experience). Also if this is a behaviour the lions frequently repeat why would whoever filmed this only do so for a few seconds rather than let the scene play out.

Oh and the cub has too many toes as well.And its eyes aren't moving.

[nowoyas]

Trying to make sense of the Nanowrimo statement to the best of my abilities and fuck, man. It's hard.

It's hard because it seems to me that, first and foremost, the organization itself has forgotten the fucking point.

Nanowrimo was never about the words themselves. It was never about having fifty thousand marketable words to sell to publishing companies and then to the masses. It was a challenge, and it was hard, and it is hard, and it's supposed to be. The point is that it's hard. It's hard to sit down and carve out time and create a world and create characters and turn these things into a coherent plot with themes and emotional impact and an ending that's satisfying. It's hard to go back and make changes and edit those into something likable, something that feels worth reading. It's hard to find a beautifully-written scene in your document and have to make the decision that it's beautiful but it doesn't work in the broader context. It's fucking hard.

Writing and editing are skills. You build them and you hone them. Writing the way the challenge initially encouraged--don't listen to that voice in your head that's nitpicking every word on the page, put off the criticism for a later date, for now just let go and get your thoughts out--is even a different skill from writing in general. Some people don't particularly care about refining that skill to some end goal or another, and simply want to play. Some people sit down and try to improve and improve and improve because that is meaningful to them. Some are in a weird in-between where they don't really know what they want, and some have always liked the idea of writing and wanted a place to start. The challenge was a good place for this--sit down, put your butt in a chair, open a blank document, and by the end of the month, try to put fifty thousand words in that document.

How does it make you feel to try? Your wrists ache and you don't feel like any of the words were any good, but didn't you learn something about the process? Re-reading it, don't you think it sounds better if you swap these two sentences, if you replace this word, if you take out this comma? Maybe you didn't hit 50k words. Maybe you only wrote 10k. But isn't it cool, that you wrote ten thousand words? Doesn't it feel nice that you did something? We can try again. We can keep getting better, or just throwing ourselves into it for fun or whatever, and we can do it again and again.

I guess I don't completely know where I'm going with this post. If you've followed me or many tumblr users for any amount of time, you've probably already heard a thousand times about how generative AI hurts the environment so many of us have been so desperately trying to save, about how generative AI is again and again used to exploit big authors, little authors, up-and-coming authors, first time authors, people posting on Ao3 as a hobby, people self-publishing e-books on Amazon, traditionally published authors, and everyone in between. You've probably seen the statements from developers of these "tools", things like how being required to obtain permission for everything in the database used to train the language model would destroy the tool entirely. You've seen posts about new AI tools scraping Ao3 so they can make money off someone else's hobby and putting the legality of the site itself at risk. For an organization that used to dedicate itself to making writing more accessible for people and for creating a community of writers, Nanowrimo has spent the past several years systematically cracking that community to bits, and now, it's made an official statement claiming that the exploitation of writers in its community is okay, because otherwise, someone might find it too hard to complete a challenge that's meant to be hard to begin with.

I couldn't thank Nanowrimo enough for what it did for me when I started out. I don't know how to find community in the same way. But you can bet that I've deleted my account, and I'll be finding my own path forward without it. Thanks for the fucking memories, I guess.

[femalefemur]

hate when you're looking up writing stuff and people are like "use this ai" like i'm not putting my stories into the fucking mediocrity machine

[suchawrathfullamb]

just saw that video of the AI thing that sees and hears everything you do and then interacts with you as a "friend" and my immediate thought was damn. this is for wholesome people cause that thing would be scared of my activities. like what would it even say to me as I write the most criminal fanfiction?? oh wow that sounds like a super fun and edgy story, would you like me to call a therapist for you?

[vixdesl]

I hate that AI being used in psychology/science articles

Ah yes...

"Detecting Detepption, the tell'-talle commmon signss of lis hil dshonesty

nobding eye ecian, avodiug eye back, leiinging d' boching".. WHAT

[swollenbabyfat]

At the end of the day I will always create, even if the world treats art as unnecessary and like it doesn’t need a human behind it who deserves to be compensated. I would really love to make my living off art, sure, it’s the only thing I love this much and the only thing I can do realistically given my situation. But I’ll keep living and I’ll keep making and sharing. There’s nothing that can take that away from me, and I refuse to do it in spite, I do it in love.

[porcupine-girl]

Fic-stealing AI site alert!

Heard about this on Bluesky, checked and they have four of my fics up! The site posts AI cover art and an AI-generated audiobook of your fic, along with the full text. I haven’t found a way to request fic get pulled from yet, I’ll update if I do.

A screenshot of my fics on the site:

UPDATE:

@museaway has dug into the domain registration and found where/how to report things to their host:

[thatangelthing]

I need a ‘This is ai’ report option/srs

What I want to do to it

[trash-is-my-birthname]

alright who did this

[warringwarrioridiot]

Why is his ass winking at me tf

[greencheekconure27]

YouTube stop recommending AI generated "films" challenge.No I don't care what your program thinks an 1950 technicolor Mulan would look like now piss off.

Also please stop suggesting me "Top ten most beautiful [animal] lists in which the cover image is CLEARLY an AI fake.

I see an AI image I click "don't recommend channel" and block.

[mittensmorgul]

after learning that ai scrapers took tons of data from ao3 a while back, it's kind of funny that everyone's clutching pearls about this current round. they didn't have "permission" or pay any money to anyone for that, and just... took stuff that was posted on the internet for anyone to see (or scrape for their theft blender).

Like... am i wrong about this? has anything on the internet been safe at any time from this sort of thing?

is there any more safety in, say, hosting your art/writing/videos/gifs, etc. on a personal blog that's still accessible to the public? where any passing bot could potentially scan and scrape it without you ever knowing?

[poisonedbymorgana]

Stanford era