#AI shit

[ingdamnit]

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-insists-tesla-isnt-a-car-company-as-sales-falter-150937418.html?guccounter=1

[physalian]

It is *scary* how close actual AI text looks to real human speech. Colloquialisms and imperfections, varied syntax in sentences, the works.

I've never had AI generate me narrative before, nor have I read verifiably AI generated narrative, but I had my suspicions about a beta reader scamming me (more than once), so I turned on ChatGPT's version of incognito mode--where it shouldn't save your chat history or use anything you give it to train its LLM--and gave it a piece of my chapter, and told it to beta read for me so I could compare the two.

And I was frankly horrified by what it returned. Ignoring the bad advice founded on the lack of context because this was just a sample bit of text from the middle of the book, it read so, so human, and it was so, so demoralizing.

The one thing that did stand out though: Because it doesn't know what it's reading, because it's not actually thinking, it's not very good at criticism (which was also why I thought my beta was cheating, the good:bad ratio was way off what I thought it should have been).

I don't need a robot to sing my praises, I know when my writing is good. I need my betas to be able to tell me when to fix my shit and how they think I should do it.

I didn't give the AI a sample text of prejudice and bigotry to "interpret" but it cannot think critically, so it can't actually tell me stuff like how something may be misinterpreted, or how XYZ detail is unintentionally sexist, at a level demanding nuance that these bots are currently (and hopefully perpetually) incapable of.

AI checkers tell you right up front that they're not fool-proof. So in a sysytem where you cannot rely on machines to detect machines, and you only have another human's word that they're not using that machine with no way to hold that person accountable, trust can erode very quickly.

To the point where we could (and might already be) screaming "Witch!" with heavy personal bias at anyone and any piece of writing we want to see fail, and once you're a suspect, unless you've got receipts (like a document version history and even that doesn't log exact keystrokes), it's not going to be easy to prove your innocence, and you shouldn't have to.

I would love nothing more than to have beta readers who are available on call and can deliver at the speeds I need them to, who care about my work as much as I do. I get the temptation to use the robots as a replacement, the robot will just never have the priceless and irreplacable value of a human.

"this is DEFINITELY written by AI, I can tell because it uses the writing quirks that AI uses (because it was trained on real people who write with those quirks)"

c'mon dudes we have got to do better than this

[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]

If you use generative AI to write, you're not a writer, you're barely a software user.

You're generating autocorrect sentences. That's not creation, that's just statistics at work. If you don't want to write, don't try to be a writer! You don't have to be a writer, or an artist. And you also don't have a right to being either, just because you feel like it. You also don't have a right to running the Olympic marathon, just because you feel like it. You gotta train for the marathon, and you gotta write to be a writer.

Letting software patch words together for you is not creation. Oh, and you're making yourself stupid and destroying the environment, so yeah, just stop.

[barbex]

[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

[do-you-like-this-mha-ship]

[kcrabb88]

Reading that article going around about college students using ChatGPT for their work has me WILDING. My undergrad and grad school institutions had a high chance of EXPELLING you if you got caught intentionally plagiarizing more than once, and you failed the class automatically if you did it EVEN once, so I can only imagine an AI bot! My college professors in my English major classes put the fear of GOD into us about plagiarism like I truly cannot imagine putting my work into an AI thing and handing it in for fear I would be killed on sight by their disappointment. What are these universities doing when these kids get caught?

[parfavar]

This is what God wanted when he invented the AI.

[benthesoldiersjeanshorts]

[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:

[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]

Daniel Kibblesmith on bluesky

This is so frustrating. Where is the concern for the world we live in?

[wingedfaith0]

My starter pack because I hate AI

[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