Suggestion: A button next to the Like that lets readers express if they think the chapter is AI written

[The Vale]

I've been seeing a lot of stories lately that match patterns of style, sentence structure and odd grammar that makes me think there's people being less than honest about how much of their writing they are actually writing vs letting the computer do it for them. And honestly a lot of those style quirks are annoying as hell. But I'm left wondering, is it just me? Posting about it in the thread would seem off topic, but having a number next to the number of likes would be able to let you say at a glance if the readers think it is generated.

Part of it is just my curiosity about getting an idea of what other people think, part of it is me wanting the option to try and avoid those really annoying, recurring elements that I think come from LLM generation. The data isn't there either way. But if we tracked "AI Gen" numbers like we track "Likes," at least on Creative Writing subforums, that could be helpful, and interesting to know.

 

[BronzePlaceWriter]

That would quickly be weaponized in order to hurt stories or authors that people didn't particularly like, and while I am no fan of Ai-written stories, I am also not a fan of handing people tools to witch hunt bad writers, new writers, or people not writing in their native tongue just because they can give an odd vibe.

One of the ways we end up with even more Ai written slop vs human written stories is to go so far in hunting AI that we accidentally make things inhospitable for humans too.

 

[LurkingInTheDeceit]

Oh, forgot to reply to this. No, that isn't happening. Sorry.

 

[joesmith1999]

handing people tools to witch hunt bad writers

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Do we have enough members for witch hunting to be a considerable problem? Like, here on QQ? Assuming the number is only inflated a little bit (by members who aren't posting anymore), let's say 20k members, that only leaves us with ~120k. Is that enough for witch hunting to even occur?

Posting about it in the thread would seem off topic

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As far as I see it, asking if something is written with or by AI shouldn't be off-topic or rude, unless its been brought up in the thread a lot already. If you politely ask an author if they used AI and they get defensive and pissy, that's a pretty big hint that they most likely did. Keyword, of course, being POLITELY.

But I don't really think it's necessary anyways. Look at it this way: if you start seeing the patterns you don't like, would you want to keep reading if they genuinely weren't AI? Personally, as soon as I get even 20% convinced it's AI garbage, I bounce straight away. That shit is NOT worth my time.

 

[BronzePlaceWriter]

Do we have enough members for witch hunting to be a considerable problem? Like, here on QQ? Assuming the number is only inflated a little bit (by members who aren't posting anymore), let's say 20k members, that only leaves us with ~120k. Is that enough for witch hunting to even occur?

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...yes?

Is 120K people enough for witch hunting? It happens in groups of hundreds. It happens in groups of tens.

 

[LurkingInTheDeceit]

Posting about it in the thread would seem off topic,

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If you politely ask an author if they used AI and they get defensive and pissy, that's a pretty big hint that they most likely did. Keyword, of course, being POLITELY.

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I find all variations of 'if they're angry about being accused of [bad thing], they probably did it' deeply suspect. If you put a lot of care and effort into something, and someone responds to that with 'did a machine write this for you', or the more confident 'a machine wrote this for you', it's not unreasonable to be a bit offended and defensive.

You're allowed to be a little rude if you pair it with constructive criticism, though. By all means, if you notice some flaws or distasteful quirks in the writing, feel free to mention them in-thread, and you can even guess at it being caused by AI. Without the substantive criticism, though, calling something AI is just saying 'this is shit' and 'you didn't write this', and we'd prefer you didn't.

 

[Malcolm Tent]

I find all variations of 'if they're angry about being accused of [bad thing], they probably did it' deeply suspect. If you put a lot of care and effort into something, and someone responds to that with 'did a machine write this for you', or the more confident 'a machine wrote this for you', it's not unreasonable to be a bit offended and defensive.

You're allowed to be a little rude if you pair it with constructive criticism, though. By all means, if you notice some flaws or distasteful quirks in the writing, feel free to mention them in-thread, and you can even guess at it being caused by AI. Without the substantive criticism, though, calling something AI is just saying 'this is shit' and 'you didn't write this', and we'd prefer you didn't.

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It doesn't help that "AI detectors" are total bullshit with no conclusive evidence to back them up. They're just pattern checkers that look for commonly used AI elements at the best of times, and LLMs are TRAINED on people's stories, so the shit they copy is patterns they learned from real people. Your average coin flip has a better chance of detecting AI than most of the detection tools people use, if they even bother.

Like if I hear one more person call something AI because someone used an em-dash I'm gonna scream. Speaking as a member of a thriving author community who have been espousing the use of em-dashes as a super punctuation for like ten years, it's just such a stupid thing to base an assumption on. To clarify, I HATE em-dashes, they try to do too much and they annoy me, but they're ABSOLUTELY a thing that many professional authors love to use, which is where the AI picked up the habit to begin with lol.

 

[The Vale]

It doesn't help that "AI detectors" are total bullshit with no conclusive evidence to back them up. They're just pattern checkers that look for commonly used AI elements at the best of times, and LLMs are TRAINED on people's stories, so the shit they copy is patterns they learned from real people. Your average coin flip has a better chance of detecting AI than most of the detection tools people use, if they even bother.

Like if I hear one more person call something AI because someone used an em-dash I'm gonna scream. Speaking as a member of a thriving author community who have been espousing the use of em-dashes as a super punctuation for like ten years, it's just such a stupid thing to base an assumption on. To clarify, I HATE em-dashes, they try to do too much and they annoy me, but they're ABSOLUTELY a thing that many professional authors love to use, which is where the AI picked up the habit to begin with lol.

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I think that more than anything illustrates why this was a bad suggestion on my part. I failed to account for people in general hyper-focusing on singular details/instances and immediately jumping to a conclusion based on that alone, And biases, obviously. No one gets good information from that kind of response.

Em-dashes are really a contentious thing? I mean, I've only really heard about em-dashes as a thing over the last few months. Never really remember noting seeing them in usage - personally I just use the good old single length dash for this kind of thing, or hyphenated words of course, and no use for a dash otherwise - and they look distinctly overlong and stand out in the examples I just looked up. Strange that I never noticed them if they are so commonplace. Or maybe not, hidden in plain sight and just part of the scenery and all.

 

[Iridesce]

Em-dashes are really a contentious thing? I mean, I've only really heard about em-dashes as a thing over the last few months.

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One of the writing forums I'm on has an entire article from like 10 years ago about the usefulness of em dashes.

 

[Malcolm Tent]

I think that more than anything illustrates why this was a bad suggestion on my part. I failed to account for people in general hyper-focusing on singular details/instances and immediately jumping to a conclusion based on that alone, And biases, obviously. No one gets good information from that kind of response.

Em-dashes are really a contentious thing? I mean, I've only really heard about em-dashes as a thing over the last few months. Never really remember noting seeing them in usage - personally I just use the good old single length dash for this kind of thing, or hyphenated words of course, and no use for a dash otherwise - and they look distinctly overlong and stand out in the examples I just looked up. Strange that I never noticed them if they are so commonplace. Or maybe not, hidden in plain sight and just part of the scenery and all.

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Varies based on what genre you read too. Progression Fantasy is full of die hard em-dash supporters, and is coincidentally one of the most hard hit by LLMs. A LOT of PF novels got pirated and used to train AI.

 

[Blarghblah]

I've been seeing a lot of stories lately that match patterns of style, sentence structure and odd grammar that makes me think there's people being less than honest about how much of their writing they are actually writing vs letting the computer do it for them. And honestly a lot of those style quirks are annoying as hell. But I'm left wondering, is it just me? Posting about it in the thread would seem off topic, but having a number next to the number of likes would be able to let you say at a glance if the readers think it is generated.

Part of it is just my curiosity about getting an idea of what other people think, part of it is me wanting the option to try and avoid those really annoying, recurring elements that I think come from LLM generation. The data isn't there either way. But if we tracked "AI Gen" numbers like we track "Likes," at least on Creative Writing subforums, that could be helpful, and interesting to know.

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Is there anything like rules wise against silent ai gen use? If so then just use the report abuse button and put "Suspected Non-Disclaimed AI Generation Use". Or are you just trying to gather data on how much of the forums is Ai generated?

 

[Iridesce]

Aren't people pretty bad at detecting ai use vs poorly written if it's even slightly edited anyway? Like people see a single em dash and assume it must be ai.

 

[BronzePlaceWriter]

Aren't people pretty bad at detecting ai use vs poorly written if it's even slightly edited anyway? Like people see a single em dash and assume it must be ai.

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Yep.

Most people who tell you they can spot AI at a glance can't. The biggest sign you can have that someone isn't as good at spotting it as they think is when they tell you that they are absolutely, completely sure.

Not that you can't spot it - I do it sometimes when I am reading. But if someone thinks they can absolutely, always, one hundred percent of the time tell? It usually means that they're just assuming anyone doing something they don't like is Ai writing and drowning in a sea of false positives and confirmation bias.

 

[Spudr]

Em-dashes are really a contentious thing? I mean, I've only really heard about em-dashes as a thing over the last few months. Never really remember noting seeing them in usage - personally I just use the good old single length dash for this kind of thing, or hyphenated words of course, and no use for a dash otherwise - and they look distinctly overlong and stand out in the examples I just looked up. Strange that I never noticed them if they are so commonplace. Or maybe not, hidden in plain sight and just part of the scenery and all.

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They're used in professional writing all the time and thus AI uses them as well, but since they're not easily accessible on a keyboard most hobbyist writers don't bother. So a lot of people in places like QQ and SB are treating them as an indicator of AI usage.

 

[AztecCroc]

They're used in professional writing all the time and thus AI uses them as well, but since they're not easily accessible on a keyboard most hobbyist writers don't bother. So a lot of people in places like QQ and SB are treating them as an indicator of AI usage.

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As opposed to the correct instance of them just being a sign that the person just happens to use Google Docs for their writing. Just put three regular dashes in a row and Docs will combine them into an em-dash.

 

[NumberSix]

I am pretty sure that at one point writers that used quills derided writers who started using pens and pencils.
And those that started using typewriters got derided by the pen and pencil crowd.
Rince and repalst through computerized word processors, auto correct and stuff like grammarly all the way to to today and the rise of the AI slop and the anti-AI hatered.

I don't think there is a point to adding this button.
If it feels like it is AI and you hate AI that much you can just stop following the story.
TBH there are a few writers whose wirting got better with some AI, but they still do some glaringly obvious mistakes that are possible flags for AI usage.

Ultimately it should be up to the writer to decide what tools to use and how may of those tools to disclose.
If I learned a fever fic was written with AI assistance I certainly wouldn't care that much.

And as someone who generated lots of AI pr0n images I have to day that it makes me more observant over some details like hands that I didn't care that much about before.

If it is good, rdollow or, ead/fap to it, if it isn't don't.

 

[tacobowl8]

Is there anything like rules wise against silent ai gen use? If so then just use the report abuse button and put "Suspected Non-Disclaimed AI Generation Use". Or are you just trying to gather data on how much of the forums is Ai generated?

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Speaking as staff, it is not currently against the rules around silent AI-usage. People are free to inform whether they use it or not, but the staff will not be enforcing it one way or another.

 

[rkyeun]

Do we have enough members for witch hunting to be a considerable problem?

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Three or more? Yes, we have three or more members.
Imposters win when a crewmate and the imposter vote off the other crewmate.
Don't play try to play Mafia in real life.

 

[Spudr]

As opposed to the correct instance of them just being a sign that the person just happens to use Google Docs for their writing. Just put three regular dashes in a row and Docs will combine them into an em-dash.

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To be fair, Google Docs users should be shamed too, just not for AI use.

 

[joesmith1999]

...yes?

Is 120K people enough for witch hunting? It happens in groups of hundreds. It happens in groups of tens.

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Three or more? Yes, we have three or more members.
Imposters win when a crewmate and the imposter vote off the other crewmate.
Don't play try to play Mafia in real life.

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I get the feeling that we have different definitions of witchhunt, but that I also don't really have a strong implicit understanding of what mine IS, so I'll take your word for it.

It doesn't help that "AI detectors" are total bullshit with no conclusive evidence to back them up. They're just pattern checkers that look for commonly used AI elements at the best of times, and LLMs are TRAINED on people's stories, so the shit they copy is patterns they learned from real people. Your average coin flip has a better chance of detecting AI than most of the detection tools people use, if they even bother.

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Yeah, the AI detectors are complete dogshit at it hahahaha. False positives, false negatives; I haven't found a single one with a success rate better than, like, 15% lmao.

Like if I hear one more person call something AI because someone used an em-dash I'm gonna scream. Speaking as a member of a thriving author community who have been espousing the use of em-dashes as a super punctuation for like ten years, it's just such a stupid thing to base an assumption on. To clarify, I HATE em-dashes, they try to do too much and they annoy me, but they're ABSOLUTELY a thing that many professional authors love to use, which is where the AI picked up the habit to begin with lol.

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Aren't people pretty bad at detecting ai use vs poorly written if it's even slightly edited anyway? Like people see a single em dash and assume it must be ai.

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Yep.

Most people who tell you they can spot AI at a glance can't. The biggest sign you can have that someone isn't as good at spotting it as they think is when they tell you that they are absolutely, completely sure.

Not that you can't spot it - I do it sometimes when I am reading. But if someone thinks they can absolutely, always, one hundred percent of the time tell? It usually means that they're just assuming anyone doing something they don't like is Ai writing and drowning in a sea of false positives and confirmation bias.

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I strongly disagree that humans can't detect AI writing, though. Sure, if your heuristic is simply "em dash = AI," then yeah, you'll be no better than a coinflip. Probably worse, actually.

But that's not how I can tell. Fiction is still a little harder than non-fiction, but even in fiction, AI has a WAAAAAAY different tone than humans do. It just doesn't write like any person.

The trick is you have to throw away "bad writing" as a marker for AI. AI makes fantastic, impeccable sentences, better than 99% of amateur writers; but, as soon as it tries to string them together into paragraphs, and string those paragraphs into a chapter or a page, it completely fails to make anything with a coherent tone or emotional throughline. Crucially, it fails in a completely different way than "bad writers" do; because all human writers—even the bad ones—have something LLMs can't replicate: a brain, which has been "trained" its entire life to communicate with spoken language.

Someone with no grasp of grammar, or spelling, or rhetoric, or conciseness, or variation, or any other pillar of good writing, will STILL make a more compelling "argument" than AI. Unless they have a condition like schizophrenia, but in cases like that, it's equally obvious it can't be AI, because the spelling and grammar and organization will be "substandard," compared to AI. "AI would never write this," basically.

LLMs work by a statistical, probabilistic model of "generating the next word backwards from white noise," essentially. As soon as you try to GENERATE something with that probabilistic model, it falls apart, except for recreating or modifying the exact material it was trained on. Just by the way it works, it's simply incapable of doing it. It can ape it for a while, but eventually it completely cocks it up.


If you're ever skeptical of something was written by AI, ask yourself if it sounds like it was written by the senior management at a company that makes office supplies. Technically perfect, but emotionally hollow.

I find all variations of 'if they're angry about being accused of [bad thing], they probably did it' deeply suspect. If you put a lot of care and effort into something, and someone responds to that with 'did a machine write this for you', or the more confident 'a machine wrote this for you', it's not unreasonable to be a bit offended and defensive.

You're allowed to be a little rude if you pair it with constructive criticism, though. By all means, if you notice some flaws or distasteful quirks in the writing, feel free to mention them in-thread, and you can even guess at it being caused by AI. Without the substantive criticism, though, calling something AI is just saying 'this is shit' and 'you didn't write this', and we'd prefer you didn't.

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I've written things that people ask are AI, and I just say "no, lol." I don't get offended by it, though I guess I can see how someone else would; so, fair enough.

Anyways, I actually think that even IF you're giving constructive criticism, you should NEVER be rude about it. If you point out an actual flaw in someone's writing, and tell them how to fix it, but do it in an asshole-ish way, then what you did was "me an asshole," not "give concrit."

 

[Jamesson Locke]

Someone with no grasp of grammar, or spelling, or rhetoric, or conciseness, or variation, or any other pillar of good writing, will STILL make a more compelling "argument" than AI.

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Oh boy, tell me you haven't been on the internet long without telling me you haven't been on the internet long.

 

[Daniel K. English]

Back when I wrote more, I used Docs. Em dashes are a great way to interrupt dialogue or a train of thought. I hate how hyphens look when substituting as em dashes.

And while I have suspected at least a couple times a story or two on the site being influenced by AI, I simply stop reading when it bothers me, just like how I treat (what I feel) is an uptick in femboy stuff.

I use AI quite a bit in my own life, from bouncing ideas to coding, but I've found its writing not suitable for me. It's good with diction, but has no sense of focus. It has no preferences, either. Its grammar is good, if not excellent. And it's not great at continuity.

It's a mixed bag overall, and I have little concern about it. A good story is good regardless of what wrote it.

 

[SnarkLord]

To be fair, Google Docs users should be shamed too, just not for AI use.

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*tilts head*
Ok, im genuinely interested why
It's way to convenient for not only being able to access on any of your devices at any time but its great for enabling beta reading.
Just post a link, and your friends can easily read and leave comments/suggestions for corrections

 

[Daniel K. English]

Ok, im genuinely interested why

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idk, folks on the net like to have random opinions these days. Docs is a sufficient word processor without needing to fork over money. Drive is free cloud storage. And everything autosaves so you aren't going to lose everything if you lose power or whatever excuse people make these days regarding delayed releases.

 

[joesmith1999]

Oh boy, tell me you haven't been on the internet long without telling me you haven't been on the internet long.

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Tell me you just skimmed the post without telling me you just skimmed the post. I don't mean an ACTUAL argument, hence the quotes. In this instance, I'm talking about "the particular emotional tone the writer is trying to convey," which I shortened for brevity. My mistake.

Again, even when people are being completely incomprehensible, you can still tell that they're TRYING to say something. AI never tries to say anything; if you read an argumentative essay written by AI, the best it can do is list the points someone WOULD make, in a vaguely organized fashion. Logically sound, rhetorically empty.

I can't think of a better way to explain it right now, but basically, AI always "vibes like" AI. The factual information it conveys (who, what, when, where, how, why, etc.) might be indistinguishable from a human, but as soon as any actual complexity gets involved, the human will make clear that they have opinions about the facts, and the AI never will, because it can't.

 

[Silvanus350]

To be fair, Google Docs users should be shamed too, just not for AI use.

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Why exactly do you hate Google Docs? LOL.

It's a text editor. It does what it needs to do. And you're not even shaming the editor; you're calling out the people using the subpar software? Bro.

Is it as strong as Microsoft Word of old? No. But this is certainly a rather interesting comparison.

I can't think of a better way to explain it right now, but basically, AI always "vibes like" AI.

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Yes. It's the style and tone of the writing. The "voice" of the author. Once you notice it in one story you'll notice it everywhere. It isn't quite the same as just "being mediocre."

I've been reading mediocre fanfiction for twenty years. It's an issue of style.