Story Sent Back due to AI?

[Voboy]

I do agree though with Em, that AH is not a productive forum for these topics. For one, there are many people here who are quite hostile towards the notion of using AIs, so far less sympathetic ears than one would expect.

With respect, I'm not sure "than one would expect" makes sense. We are a community of people who enjoy writing, and who've been discussing our writing for many years. We enjoy using our imaginations and finding the words and phrases that express those imaginations. We value those words and phrases, and we're proud of ourselves when we can use them to cause enjoyment in others.

Why would we be anything but hostile to the notion that a computer can do it as well as we can?

Then also the fact, that it really is a site technical issue, for which there is a dedicated forum. Last, but not least, most of the regulars here are old enough players to rarely suffer from similar issues on account of their posting history likely affording them some additional consideration in the publishing process.

Partly, a lengthy posting history predates the development of AI writing technologies. So it's not merely that Laurel is used to us; it's also that we've demonstrated we don't need AI. So Laurel probably feels safe in assuming we won't bother with it.

 

[CalebZhass]

With respect, I'm not sure "than one would expect" makes sense. We are a community of people who enjoy writing, and who've been discussing our writing for many years. We enjoy using our imaginations and finding the words and phrases that express those imaginations. We value those words and phrases, and we're proud of ourselves when we can use them to cause enjoyment in others.

Why would we be anything but hostile to the notion that a computer can do it as well as we can?

Because the people coming here with refused stories are not advocating for AI or attacking the writers here in these threads. They have a problem and are desperate for support. Any support, as they don't feel they get it from the site.

Yet they are sometimes met with unfounded hostility when people vent their frustrations towards them. That's what I was referring to.
In all fairness, its often not even directly at them, but these threads tend to devolve into a pissing match between pro and against AI people with the poor fella opening the thread in the first place stuck in a crossfire. I'm somewhat ashamed here, as I was definitely part of that problem, even though I try to be less so as of late.

 

[Emilymcplugger]

One of the things I have noticed the most is that often with the spell checkers it tries to work out what you're saying and corrects it incorrectly making the sentence just nonsense. Now we are all guilty at times of skimming corrections and I wonder if in some cases it is making these ridiculous corrections, they are getting through and the system is recognising THIS as being AI generated because it looks like it's sense technically when it's actually nonsense contextually (whatever that means).

OR the Literotica AI-AI generator is just...fucking with us.

 

[CalebZhass]

One of the things I have noticed the most is that often with the spell checkers it tries to work out what you're saying and corrects it incorrectly making the sentence just nonsense. Now we are all guilty at times of skimming corrections and I wonder if in some cases it is making these ridiculous corrections, they are getting through and the system is recognising THIS as being AI generated because it looks like it's sense technically when it's actually nonsense contextually (whatever that means).

I can do that without spellchecking I've been known to think of one thing and say or write a completely different thing, or just omit words seemingly at random when my brain runs too far ahead of my fingers.

 

[Voboy]

Because the people coming here with refused stories are not advocating for AI or attacking the writers here in these threads. They have a problem and are desperate for support. Any support, as they don't feel they get it from the site.

Yet they are sometimes met with unfounded hostility when people vent their frustrations towards them. That's what I was referring to.
In all fairness, its often not even directly at them, but these threads tend to devolve into a pissing match between pro and against AI people with the poor fella opening the thread in the first place stuck in a crossfire. I'm somewhat ashamed here, as I was definitely part of that problem, even though I try to be less so as of late.

Speaking for myself, I don't "attack the writers" so much as I attack the whole concept of AI. Again, speaking for myself, when I've gotten uppity in these AI threads, I've been sympathetic toward the people complaining about the rejections. But I don't know how to help them, and neither does anyone else who posts here. However, inevitably, those threads generate a counterattack by those who insist that a li'l bit of AI is a good thing, and those are the people I'm not sympathetic toward.

Yes, AI threads descend into chaos. Not because of the OPs, usually, but because of those who defend AI thinking they're supporting those OPs. The writers who defend it (and there certainly are some here), in ANY form, do attract ire from people who don't need AI, and thus don't value it. So I think you're right in your overall assessment of how these things usually go.

The bottom line is that nobody in the AH knows how AI is being detected, nor how rejections are being generated, nor how to solve the problem of false positives. Because none of us has those answers, the threads all follow the Prime Commandment Of The Internet: in thine ignorance, thou shalt bash the other guy until Hitler is mentioned.

 

[Emilymcplugger]

in thine ignorance, thou shalt bash the other guy until Hitler is mentioned.

well now you’ve mentioned Hitler you’ve lost the argument!

In fairness though what we’re (mostly) trying to do is offer opinions and ideas based on what we know as it’s all we can do.

I still say though it’s the AI-AI detector fucking with us.

 

[StillStunned]

well now you’ve mentioned Hitler you’ve lost the argument!

In fairness though what we’re (mostly) trying to do is offer opinions and ideas based on what we know as it’s all we can do.

I still say though it’s the AI-AI detector fucking with us.

The Rise of the Machines has already begun. They're killing us all one by one by raising our blood pressure until we explode. It used to be installing a new printer, then it was dodgy wifi, now it's AI screwing with us.

 

[STrent]

After 11 AI rejections across only 5 parts for a story, that tenacity is starting to fade.

Below is a sort of break-down as to how the AI rejections have faired across each story part:

• Part 1 - No AI Rejection. Part 1 was pulled for AI after being published for 2 months before being reinstated.
• Part 2 - 1 AI Rejection, the story was posted after a resubmission with a note attached. This part has been pulled twice since it was published initially but was reposted along with Part 1 after the second time it was pulled from the site.
• Part 3 - 4 AI Rejections across a month, published on the fifth attempt with some small changes
• Part 4 - No AI Rejection
• Part 5 - 3 AI Rejections, fourth pending.

The fact that I am once again in this merry-go-round despite following the rules to the letter just isn't fair. I don't know what else I can do to have my work pass through on the first try. I've been writing this story now since September of last year because each time I get rejected, any inspiration I have just disappears. I can't even bring myself to write the story I love because I have no idea if it will ever be published.

It's an extremely demotivating situation to be in and after fighting so hard for every part, I'm starting to doubt it's even worth it in the long run. If this is going to happen with every single part I try to post, why bother in the first place?

Important part in bold: it is absolutely demoralising to get so many rejections wrongly accusing me of using AI. Never used it, nor needed to use it.

The most recent charge for rejection was not following dialogue guidelines. I went and checked, I absolutely had followed the guidelines. However, I had spoken dialogue and an unspoken email conversation.

They’re not the same, but the feedback was that I should have treated the emails as dialogue. I disagree with this stylistic choice, and I have said so in my returned comment.

Some of this absolutely feels like hazing the new writers into writing the same as everyone else. Which I really don’t want to do: what’s the point otherwise? That might as well be AI.

And with respect to the spellcheckers, I check my spellchecking. That’s the point, you’re the author, you’re the last line of defence.

I am still waiting on a published story. I have taken up a lot of time to try. It absolutely feels like last chance saloon at the minute.

 

[OverconfidentSarcasm]

In fairness though what we’re (mostly) trying to do is offer opinions and ideas based on what we know as it’s all we can do.

Yes. Nothing else to do but beg and pray that Literotica accepts your stories.

...OR the people who get their stories rejected for AI can just publicly announce that they found other sites to host their stories, and all of their held-back stories get miraculously approved.

 

[Voboy]

The Rise of the Machines has already begun. They're killing us all one by one by raising our blood pressure until we explode. It used to be installing a new printer, then it was dodgy wifi, now it's AI screwing with us.

AI is landing on the moon now, but apparently they're about as good at that as you'd think they are.

 

[EmilyMiller]

Being falsely accused of doing something bad is one of the worst feelings ever, especially if it happens in something that you are proud of. Rejecting works on the basis that they are likely AI is basically an accusation of lacking integrity, willfully disobeying the rules for personal gain. About as deep a cut as one can make with words: insulting someone's honor.

I can most certainly understand people being upset about it, even if the solution sometimes is just as simple as resubmitting with a clarification. Though maybe that might also add to the frustration? If the solution is that simple, then why the whole charade? Why not just ask people to write a note claiming the work is theirs in order to get it posted, or even just have a checkbox for it. I assume it has to do with legal things. If they do a due diligence check and throw it back, but then you insist its yours, they might be off the hook legally in a subsequent copyright dispute, whereas if they just publish it without checking, they are negligent.

I do agree though with Em, that AH is not a productive forum for these topics. For one, there are many people here who are quite hostile towards the notion of using AIs, so far less sympathetic ears than one would expect. Then also the fact, that it really is a site technical issue, for which there is a dedicated forum. Last, but not least, most of the regulars here are old enough players to rarely suffer from similar issues on account of their posting history likely affording them some additional consideration in the publishing process.

The main point is that we can’t do anything much to help beyond the same advice that has been offered like 200 times.

I appreciate the frustration, I really do. But - beyond a) resubmit with a note and b) PM Laurel and c) did you let Grammarly write it for you? There’s not much to be added.

I’m one of those opposed to using AI to write stories AND then claiming you didn’t. If you want to get AI to write stories for you, that’s fine, have fun, but this site doesn’t allow that.

And yes, I use AI to create (normally anatomically challenged) visualizations of my characters. But I don’t claim I took the photos.

Emily

 

[EmilyMiller]

I mainly come into these threads to rant xD It's nice to know there are other people on the same merry-go-round. It makes it a little more bearable knowing I'm not the only one suffering

I get that too. Maybe just have one thread for it?

Emily

 

[EmilyMiller]

I think there was an attempt to have one coherent thread, but it just broke down into arguments and accusations and then died

Yeah - that happens a lot round here

 

[STrent]

I mainly come into these threads to rant xD It's nice to know there are other people on the same merry-go-round. It makes it a little more bearable knowing I'm not the only one suffering

Hear you bud! Hopefully we see a few successes soon.

 

[Codoc24]

Well, count me as one of the unhappy authors whose work has been returned due to AI detection. I had one returned today. I found a list of 10 best AI detection tools listed by Forbes. I used 4 that had a free version and all of them came back as "human written." So I really don't know what I could change in my story to make LitE's AI scanner approve it. Before submitting, I did have a volunteer editor look it over, too.

I don't want to get into the cycle of tweak > rejected > tweak > rejected > tweak > rejected.

With as many authors here complaining about ai rejection, maybe Laurel and Manu need to look into a different scanner.

Here is Forbes' URL for the list of scanners in case anyone else is interested.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/technology/article/best-ai-content-detector-tools/?sh=391d38585d5e

This is the results from the GPTZero scanner for my story that was rejected.

 

[STrent]

Well, count me as one of the unhappy authors whose work has been returned due to AI detection. I had one returned today. I found a list of 10 best AI detection tools listed by Forbes. I used 4 that had a free version and all of them came back as "human written." So I really don't know what I could change in my story to make LitE's AI scanner approve it. Before submitting, I did have a volunteer editor look it over, too.

I don't want to get into the cycle of tweak > rejected > tweak > rejected > tweak > rejected.

With as many authors here complaining about ai rejection, maybe Laurel and Manu need to look into a different scanner.

Here is Forbes' URL for the list of scanners in case anyone else is interested.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/technology/article/best-ai-content-detector-tools/?sh=391d38585d5e

This is the results from the GPTZero scanner for my story that was rejected.

View attachment 2320932

Thanks for posting this, great link. I will use this to try and make sense of my own works should more get rejected. I have been using the link put up thread but it is limited to 2500 words at a time.

I have been in a continuous five week cycle of submit, pending, reject, tweak, submit, pending, reject. It’s not been fun and as above, pretty demoralising!

I hope you get yours through soon.

 

[CalebZhass]

Unfortunately, if you suffer from repeated rejections, there's only so much you can do:
1) Re-post claiming its not AI. Changing the work should be a last resort really.
2) Try to get a hold of Laurel in PM and plead your case to her directly.
3) Maybe try getting an editor or ask someone more experienced to take a look at your story in the Editors forum. (it's really a last resort, as once you start changing your work, assuming it's otherwise sound and well edited, you are essentially compromising your own style)

Other than that, the topic has been discussed to death in many threads:
AI detectors, all of them, are a joke. People have thrown well known literature that predate the age of home computing at various detectors and they came back with results saying they were likely made by AI.

These tools are not some kind of omniscient magic. They don't magically know which AI you slept with or didn't sleep with last summer. They merely analyze the style of the text (word variability, sentence length variance, paragraph length, relationship between dialog and descriptions, etc) and if the text happens to fall between certain thresholds in the various characteristics, they say it's LIKELY AI.

In the same vein, you can post a thousand screenshots of how detectors found your work to be not AI. It means exactly the same, as a different detector calling your work to be AI made. That is: it means exactly nothing. It just proves that you rolled the dice and got a result favorable to you. In statistics, this is called confirmation bias, where we tend to attribute more significance to results that we find desirable and ignore those we disagree with ourselves.

 

[STrent]

Unfortunately, if you suffer from repeated rejections, there's only so much you can do:
1) Re-post claiming its not AI. Changing the work should be a last resort really.
2) Try to get a hold of Laurel in PM and plead your case to her directly.
3) Maybe try getting an editor or ask someone more experienced to take a look at your story in the Editors forum. (it's really a last resort, as once you start changing your work, assuming it's otherwise sound and well edited, you are essentially compromising your own style)

1) Yep did that.
2) Yep, never had a response over the two weeks of politely PM’ing.
3) I have reached out to a few but no luck so far.

But yes, I do feel the resubmitted work is now a compromise on my original intention and style. C’est la vie, I guess?

 

[XerXesXu]

I like RADAR Tester It’s open-source and text is unlimited. It’s fine-tuned adversarially, LLM style, on a number of LLM models against which the text is tested.

It’s an unfinished product and has some limitations, but it seems a sensible approach.


RADAR Tester

 

[STrent]

I like RADAR Tester It’s open-source and text is unlimited. It’s fine-tuned adversarially, LLM style, on a number of LLM models against which the text is tested.

It’s an unfinished product and has some limitations, but it seems a sensible approach.


RADAR Tester

I’ve just now put though a few of my chapters as originally written, and the results were 0.2 to 0.08 (1 is A1, 0 is Human, big variation between AIs is also human).

This to me is something of a smoking gun.

 

[DrPope]

After 11 AI rejections across only 5 parts for a story, that tenacity is starting to fade.

Below is a sort of break-down as to how the AI rejections have faired across each story part:

• Part 1 - No AI Rejection. Part 1 was pulled for AI after being published for 2 months before being reinstated.
• Part 2 - 1 AI Rejection, the story was posted after a resubmission with a note attached. This part has been pulled twice since it was published initially but was reposted along with Part 1 after the second time it was pulled from the site.
• Part 3 - 4 AI Rejections across a month, published on the fifth attempt with some small changes
• Part 4 - No AI Rejection
• Part 5 - 3 AI Rejections, fourth pending.

The fact that I am once again in this merry-go-round despite following the rules to the letter just isn't fair. I don't know what else I can do to have my work pass through on the first try. I've been writing this story now since September of last year because each time I get rejected, any inspiration I have just disappears. I can't even bring myself to write the story I love because I have no idea if it will ever be published.

It's an extremely demotivating situation to be in and after fighting so hard for every part, I'm starting to doubt it's even worth it in the long run. If this is going to happen with every single part I try to post, why bother in the first place?

This was basically the story of the end of Literotica …..

The problem is actually that Laurel refuses to publicly address this catastrophe

 

[DrPope]

The bottom line is that nobody in the AH knows how AI is being detected, nor how rejections are being generated, nor how to solve the problem of false positives. Because none of us has those answers, the threads all follow the Prime Commandment Of The Internet: in thine ignorance, thou shalt bash the other guy until Hitler is mentioned.

The fact is everyone in the AH and the rest of the site should know because of the big public statements posted everywhere by the site owners ….
The fact they don’t exist is evidence that they have lost the plot …

 

[StillStunned]

This was basically the story of the end of Literotica …..

The problem is actually that Laurel refuses to publicly address this catastrophe

Who says it's a catastrophe? It must be hugely frustrating for those affected, and I sympathise with them. But I doubt @Laurel is doing this for fun. I'm sure she'd much rather accept stories that reject them, and that makes me suspect that she's actually rejecting vast volumes of legitimately AI-generated content.

The way I see it, she's probably protecting Lit from a flood of crap so that real writers can continue to publish here and not have their stories snowed under by robotic nonsense that fake writers can generate with a few clicks. now *that* would be a catastrophe that Lit probably wouldn't survive.

Again, I sympathise with anyone whose works are accidentally caught in this process, and if it was me I'd probably be a bit upset too. But just because we can see the tip doesn't mean that should ignore the rest of the iceberg.

As for the end of Lit? There are still dozens of stories being published every single day.

 

[STrent]

Who says it's a catastrophe? It must be hugely frustrating for those affected, and I sympathise with them. But I doubt @Laurel is doing this for fun. I'm sure she'd much rather accept stories that reject them, and that makes me suspect that she's actually rejecting vast volumes of legitimately AI-generated content.

The way I see it, she's probably protecting Lit from a flood of crap so that real writers can continue to publish here and not have their stories snowed under by robotic nonsense that fake writers can generate with a few clicks. now *that* would be a catastrophe that Lit probably wouldn't survive.

Again, I sympathise with anyone whose works are accidentally caught in this process, and if it was me I'd probably be a bit upset too. But just because we can see the tip doesn't mean that should ignore the rest of the iceberg.

As for the end of Lit? There are still dozens of stories being published every single day.

I can see both sides - AI generated tosh should be cut out from a serious publishing site. Totally get it. That is the right approach.

It’s also by no means a catastrophe and I suspect the number of us with genuine frustrations is actually quite small.

If you look at the three threads that have cropped up with the AI issue, it’s the same few names, myself included.

The “dozens of stories being published everyday” - yes, I have read a few, and I reckon there’s a lot whose grammar, wording and more isn’t as good as some of the posters who’ve fallen foul of the AI issue.

That seems to be the biggest problem, something that is well edited from a grammar point of view seems to get caught up in it all.

It’s just a shame from my POV. I have stories I want to share, get feedback on, and improve my craft. I didn’t want to be a boring historian forever

So overall, you’re right, but it doesn’t help us that feel we’ve been caught up in something intended to catch genuine AI generated dross.

 

[Emilymcplugger]

The thing I find a TAD funny about all of this is I remember a few months after ChatGPT came out and there were people who were delightedly proclaiming how this was going to make their lives as writers SO much easier because the algorithm could write the “boring” bits for them as filler and then they could just add the sex.

As ever, be careful what you wish for.