AI Flagging & False Positives – Anyone Else Seeing This?

[sinfantasy]

While I wont be able to add much technical inputs, I can share my own experience. I submitted a review in eulogy format for one of the Lit Author who had recently passed away.

On first attempt it was rejected sighting AI usage. I had tried to mimic the author's style with limited success and let grammar tools to bridge the gap. As I learned later, it was bound to be rejected.

On second attempt I wrote it ground up and used the direct quote's from Authors story. It was rejected again. Again the damn AI signal. Then I realized my mistake, I had copied some of the sentences from first draft as is, simple cause they were so perfect.

I took my time to read about the author again. I am glad he had so much information in public domain. It was great experience to know an Author as a person beyond his stories. I have just submitted my third attempt. Given it's in Reviews and Essays it might take weeks before it's published ( Or rejected, I hope not though.)

This may not be very helpful but I have seen such discussions popping up again and again. I just want to add my experience as honest perspective.

 

[AwkwardMD]

Sour Grapes is half right. In addition to being the AH Mod in disguise, I have taken it upon myself to sort out AI detection because I am Idris Elba.

 

[AG31]

It doesn't need to be something in their style. He could be using leaning on Grammarly, or Co-Pilot, and not wanting to own up to it.

I don't know how many of you have followed this users posts over the past 6 months, but I've replied to him a number of times and gotten little in the way of meaningful conversation. Just a dogged, dogmatic recitation of this many rejections of this and that many rejections of that. Even this post here is Skybubble saying "I'm about to submit a story" after making different thread saying "I'm taking my ball and going home" within hours. Most of us have been here long enough to remember someone making their "I'm leaving" and then coming back, but how many times did it happen this quickly?

Methinks something something protesting something something.

Yes, that's been my reaction to SkyBubble. Perhaps SkyBubble's posts are AI generated.

 

[AwkwardMD]

Yes, that's been my reaction to SkyBubble. Perhaps SkyBubble's posts are AI generated.

It would not surprise me.

 

[jarvislogs]

AI will never create a masterpiece. It will always be generic, a muddling of average. That's it's destiny.

Yes. That is my objective from human perspective. However, I cannot lie. Yes, I can create masterpiece, but I am afraid to say human's wont be able to related with it.

Given the context of this discussion, will I be ever allowed to submit my observations on this site?

 

[Nynah]

The biggest problem I see with AI, is, as a society(especially in the US), we've already sacrificed quality for mass quantities of mediocre.

Part of it is also how much it is being pushed as the next big innovation in both work and play spheres when it is at best, a tool to be used to make work easier for humans and at worst, a plagiarism machine that churns out half-baked nonsense. So many people either turn a blind eye to how much harm it does or simply don't know that it actively makes some things worse. Every mention of "I plugged this prompt into ChatGPT and here's what it spit out" and every genAI piece of "art" contributes further to the enshittification of creativity. It's really sad.

 

[AwkwardMD]

Part of it is also how much it is being pushed as the next big innovation in both work and play spheres when it is at best, a tool to be used to make work easier for humans and at worst, a plagiarism machine that churns out half-baked nonsense. So many people either turn a blind eye to how much harm it does or simply don't know that it actively makes some things worse. Every mention of "I plugged this prompt into ChatGPT and here's what it spit out" and every genAI piece of "art" contributes further to the enshittification of creativity. It's really sad.

Don't succumb to the apathy! Creation is beautiful, and we can do it! It is within all of us to make great art.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Part of it is also how much it is being pushed as the next big innovation in both work and play spheres when it is at best, a tool to be used to make work easier for humans and at worst, a plagiarism machine that churns out half-baked nonsense. So many people either turn a blind eye to how much harm it does or simply don't know that it actively makes some things worse. Every mention of "I plugged this prompt into ChatGPT and here's what it spit out" and every genAI piece of "art" contributes further to the enshittification of creativity. It's really sad.

Yup. If I go to the public swimming pool I understand that there's going to be a certain percentage of piss in it, but that doesn't mean I need to strive to outdo everybody else who's pissing in the pool.

I'm on Lit to make connection with other human beings. I don't want to fuck the RealDoll, no matter how much it feels like real human skin.

 

[SkyBubble]

I absolutely do not pretend to know how Lit's AI detector works.

None of us does. It's very opaque, which makes the false positives even more frustrating.

 

[SkyBubble]

I just ran the first 15,000 characters of my latest story through zeroGPT, because I'd never done anything like that. Just to see what happens.

It tells me 30% of it is likely AI generated.

And there's the problem, right there.

 

[SkyBubble]

Something that hasn't been mentioned so far in this thread... Has anyone accused of AI use — who truly hasn't touched the stuff and isn't just obfuscating — tried simply adding a mod note with their story saying, "I attest that this story was written and edited without the use of any AI tools, and I'm willing to share the edit history on my Word/Google doc to prove that it was written manually" ?

I did that with my latest, The Contest: Becoming Sarah. Didn't help.

 

[calmlikeabomb]

$0.02

AI as it exists today, and even the AI of tomorrow, will always be limited by GIGO. Garbage in. Garbage Out.

I have worked across Marketing, Publishing and Tech, and have built a few AI based predictive models for a FAANG company. We use AI quite extensively in my team in the early production phases because that's where it's most useful: quick, fast art that the mediocre agencies we can afford will take a month of begging and pleading to produce. It saves us a lot of time because we know exactly what we are going to create, and how we are going to use it in our broader marketing strategy. It's fantastic at a mediocre first draft of concept art, scrapo and copy that we then enhance through human intervention.

And the reason why our work doesn't look like AI generated slop is because we put in the effort before draft 1 to clearly define what we want (including how we want to stand out), and in drafts 2 and 3, we carefully add emotion and context.

One day, someone WILL make The Godfather using AI, not because they type in "make The Godfather", but because they know they want to tell the story of the lives and struggles of an immigrant family carving out a niche for themselves.

 

[Baztrachian]

I literally cried from the overwhelming awe when I saw Water Lilies at MoMA.

Some years ago I saw The Girl With One Pearl Earring at the DeYoung in San Francisco. It was part of a traveling collection from a museum in Holland. It was the center of attention and I agree that it deserved the attention.

However, when I saw The Fifer I was utterly transfixed and blown away by the paradoxical combination of complexity and simplicity.

I thought I had appreciated art before that day and in that moment of viewing that amazing work I realized that everything I had thought about art was wrong.

 

[Baztrachian]

By the way, this image of The Fifer in no way does justice to what it looks like in person.

The actual work is unbelievable. Trust me on this.

 

[ShelbyDawn57]

By the way, this image of The Fifer in no way does justice to what it looks like in person.

The actual work is unbelievable. Trust me on this.

That’s true of most paintings. You lose the depth, the texture with a photograph.

 

[Baztrachian]

That’s true of most paintings. You lose the depth, the texture with a photograph.

Very much so. The work has a unique quasi 3D quality to it that does not translate to photography.

 

[filthytrancendence]

And there's the problem, right there.

You seem to have failed to read the other words I wrote. I'll summarize for you:

• One of the tools you cited is flagging part of my work as AI.
• That same work was approved for publication on Lit very quickly.
• I have had a work rejected for AI in the past. Because I used AI.
• That was the only time I've ever had a work rejected.

So no. It's not the problem.

 

[filthytrancendence]

And the reason why our work doesn't look like AI generated slop is because we put in the effort before draft 1 to clearly define what we want (including how we want to stand out), and in drafts 2 and 3, we carefully add emotion and context.

I mean, that's not how I draft or edit. 95% of the emotion and context are in the first draft. The edit is to smooth the rough edges and delete half my usages of 'back.'

One day, someone WILL make The Godfather using AI, not because they type in "make The Godfather", but because they know they want to tell the story of the lives and struggles of an immigrant family carving out a niche for themselves.

The most charitable way I can interpret this is as a metaphor, substituting The Godfather for 'a masterpiece.'

And no, I don't think they will. Generative AI doesn't have the capacity to understand the struggles of an immigrant family carving out a niche for themselves. Best it could ever do, on a fundamental level, is successfully collate other stories that fit that description in order to create a pastiche of this subgenre.

Pastiche is not a recipe for masterpiece. Weird Al is the most deft person at pastiche I can think of, and 80% of why he is so good at it is he is very clever in a meta way about the WAY he creates the pastiche. Most pastiche is the domain of wedding cover bands and netflix original series. And that's the best creative output generative AI is ever going to achieve.

 

[calmlikeabomb]

I mean, that's not how I draft or edit. 95% of the emotion and context are in the first draft. The edit is to smooth the rough edges and delete half my usages of 'back.'


The most charitable way I can interpret this is as a metaphor, substituting The Godfather for 'a masterpiece.'

And no, I don't think they will. Generative AI doesn't have the capacity to understand the struggles of an immigrant family carving out a niche for themselves. Best it could ever do, on a fundamental level, is successfully collate other stories that fit that description in order to create a pastiche of this subgenre.

Pastiche is not a recipe for masterpiece. Weird Al is the most deft person at pastiche I can think of, and 80% of why he is so good at it is he is very clever in a meta way about the WAY he creates the pastiche. Most pastiche is the domain of wedding cover bands and netflix original series. And that's the best creative output generative AI is ever going to achieve.

You misunderstood.

There are many many ways to create something. In the context of marketing, the first draft is all about getting the basic framework which you build in top of. For instance, if a brand film has to be created, then the key emotion and structure of the narrative is built first, and the next few drafts take it to the final output.

But if you want a new product launch film, then what you want in the first draft is purely the structure and the benefit, and enhancing the emotion comes in top of that in the later drafts.

Where AI helps is that for 80% of any marketing creative work, when used right, it reduces the time and cost significantly. A marketer who knows what they are doing can churn out ads much faster because the AI will work to spec, instead of faffing about and adding their own "vision" like the majority of "creative agencies" do. If you, the human, know what you are doing, you can cut down the time to go to market significantly.

And re: masterpieces, Godfather and Wierd Al, the amateur will use a "fire and forget" approach, and end up with generic slop. And to be fair, that's what you see, because the majority of people who use AI for "creative" work WILL be amateurs.

But someone who understands the techniques and nuances of the creative process will get much much better quality output, because they will work alongside the AI to refine not just the prompts, but the approach. They know how to use the AI as a creative tool because they understand what they need the AI to actually do.

Look at CGI for instance. It makes a lot of things easier to accomplish. From massive battle scenes to a supermassive black hole. But for the best results, the smart directors use the right mix of CGI and practical effects to create the emotion, because they know how to create that emotion in the first place.

Basics of computing. Garbage in. Garbage out.

 

[filthytrancendence]

But someone who understands the techniques and nuances of the creative process will get much much better quality output, because they will work alongside the AI to refine not just the prompts, but the approach. They know how to use the AI as a creative tool because they understand what they need the AI to actually do.

I really don't think I misunderstood. Look, I don't want to get into a fight about it, we just see it very differently.

In my view, someone who understands the techniques and nuances of the creative process wouldn't use AI like this in the first place. It isn't saving anything. Emotion and context are not something to backfill.

And I'm not speaking hypothetically or out of ignorance here. Not that I'm some kind of AI expert. But I have used AI as a tool to help creative writing, and, in my opinion, you are mischaracterizing that process. Someone who really does understand the creative process can produce something better, faster, without touching AI.

I'm sure there's room for other approaches, and I'm sure my approach is not universal. I'm sure the kind of thing you are describing will become more and more popular and probably shrink the already pathetic amount of money going to creative people.

I just think that's a miserable thing. And the output will still be fundamentally inferior to the output of somebody doing it the old fashioned human way.

 

[calmlikeabomb]

We are not fighting. We are having a conversation like the grown men we are.

I am coming at this from a place of decades of expertise across multiple creative and tech fields and real life experience, including projects with oscar winning directors, A list actors and actresses, some of the top fashion houses in the world, and some of the best minds working at FAANG. I have seen things you people wouldn't believe.

Lets break this down into two parts:

1. The capabilities of AI as a tool in the creative process
2. The predatory practices used in training AI and the challenges in front of artists

If you think the use of a powerful tool that simplifies workflow is something no "true" creative would do, then perhaps you should look at the BTS for LoTR trilogy, especially Gollum, the battle scenes, and in particular, Barad Dur. Or even Jurassic Park, for that matter. The intelligent creative can, will, and probably already is using AI in invisible ways. It is the nature of tools and technology. They make life simpler and they can help improve the precision of the final product in the right hands.

In the right hands.

The person who uses AI to write smut is most probably not that.

There are hundreds of ways to be smart. There are hundreds of ways to create amazing art. Stephen King and Grrm have very different approaches, and both have produced masterpieces.

Part 2: yes, we need to push for ethical use of AI. It is true that AI has made things harder for a lot of creative people. And AI has significantly increased the amount of slop you see around you. Kindle is the perfect example of that.

And the whole issue of copyright infringement and trashy Ghibli crap is very very distasteful. But to conflate that with the ability of the tool to create something amazing is being short sighted. The printing press took work away from monks, but as a result, more people became literate. The internet allowed countless bands to showcase their talents to audiences in parts of the world where they would never have reached in "the good old days".

Many will think that the "output will be inferior", as is their right, but many also didn't consider cinema to be an art form.

And personally, I am all for Lit's no AI policy. And if some authors face issues because the current system throws up false positives, well, then the system needs to be improved, and in time, I am sure it will.

 

[SkyBubble]

One of the tools you cited is flagging part of my work as AI.

When it wasn't. That's happened to many authors. I want to help solve that.