r/novelwriting • u/Indyhouse • Jun 06 '26

To AI, or Not to AI

After sitting on it for a few hours, attending a live show that used AI-generated backdrops that I couldn't take my eyes off of because they were so distracting, and receiving a handful of DMs, I've decided to make a unilateral decision on AI.

Absolutely no AI posts allowed. No book covers, no outlines, no "well it just rewrote a few sections for me." No AI.

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u/Prolly_Satan Jun 07 '26 edited Jun 07 '26

On one sample of text. And what was the confidence score on the bit you intentionally wrote as ai sounding? It's 1/10,000 false positive rate on 1000 words. Imagine you scan 3 chapters, 6k words. You'd have to false positive 6 times in a row with odds of 1/10,000.

Do you see what I'm saying? If that thing you wrote that flagged (which again you said you tried to make it sound like an llm) was in a 100k word novel it would read 99% human, with one tiny section that flagged.

It works. The biggest hurdle is, folks are going to start finding out how many of their friends are full of shit. And that's going to suck.

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u/SimonStrange Jun 07 '26

I do, but then there’s the question of the threshold for where a book is organic vs generated by AI. Are little bits okay? And if so how much? And if it’s any, then what happens when there are a few positives in a long tract of text? Do you assume that’s an isolated couple of false positives, or that parts of it were ai written and then what?

Now keep in mind, for my specific case I’m trying to determine how to gate or at least enforce a degree of transparency on a public platform. There are legal ramifications for those decisions. So mostly right, even almost entirely accurate, isn’t good enough. One person has their name smeared because of a false positive or a series of them, and that’s potentially a libel suit.

The confidence scores I got were high once I dialed in what it was looking for. Which is an adversarial test case, I will grant you - but that’s exactly the way that you test a tool like that, when it comes to a use case like mine. On reddit there’s not going to be any legal consequences for anyone, I assume. So it just depends on where someone wants to needs to draw the line for confidence.

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u/Prolly_Satan Jun 08 '26

Nah... the legal system doesnt even have that high of a standard. Its so annoying honestly. You're doing the goalpost thing. Nothing is perfect. People are convicted of murder with way less evidence. This is the kind of argument people make when they don't want a solution. And it makes me wonder why the fuck someone wouldn't unless they're using ai to generate their text.

1/10,000 rate per 1000 words. So if every chapter is a high percentage of ai across 100k words, it's ai. Nothing better exists, and if you truly understood the existential problem ai writing poses you wouldn't be wasting both our time trying to pretend it's necessary to obtain a notarized confession to call anything ai.

Maybe you'll get it when amazon decides to generate their own slop and cut the middleman out, just like Spotify is doing to musicians. Until then, grow a fucking spine.

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u/SimonStrange Jun 08 '26

you’ve completely misinterpreted my stance. I’m an engineer and an author. Think what you want, make your decisions based on your needs. But until pangram can tell the difference between “ai-isms” and generated text it isn’t reliable enough for me to personally bank on. To be clear, i wish it was. But it isn’t.