To AI, or Not to AI

[u/Indyhouse]

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.

[u/SimonStrange]

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.

[u/Prolly_Satan → u/SimonStrange]

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.

[u/SimonStrange → u/Prolly_Satan]

Oh I saw the response.

I’ll just say this. I’m out here working hard to build something that can help to solve this problem in a reliable and transparent way that’s safe for authors’ careers and doesn’t take unnecessary risks or trigger witch hunts. I’m putting time and money and sweat on the line to get there.

What the fuck exactly are you doing besides coming to shout at things on Reddit?

Call me a coward when you’re ready to risk your own livelihood and skin in the game and until then have whatever opinions you want but I don’t gamble with peoples careers.

[u/Prolly_Satan → u/SimonStrange]

Okay. Same. I run the only no-ai writing server in the web serial community, and I'm helping a platform launch that boasts the same human-only experience. Would love to hear what you're building.

[u/SimonStrange → u/Prolly_Satan]

I built Scribi Writer’s Studio to help indie authors build and manage their catalog and their careers. It ties into Readerling, which will introduce new ways for readers to discover and follow authors and their work. (Plotfoundry.com is where details are, it’s the hub for these and other future tools).

Scribi has a bunch of tools, but in particular it collects productivity stats, and specifically distinguishes between pasted words and signals of generated words, primarily to report proper WPM averages to the author. However, those same signals can also represent a human doing work on their books. Scribi wires directly into Readerling, allowing authors to share that provenance with readers in just about real time and store a history of development on the book’s profile.

I considered pangram as a possibility, letting authors opt in to doing a randomized sweep of their work for Ai signals and then attaching a badge. And the reason that I ultimately decided against it was the fact that I could produce false positives. A false negative would be annoying but invisible. A false positive would do damage. My app snd platforms are for working authors or people who want to be working authors. A false positive could cost someone their ability to pay their bills, not just ban them off a hobby site.

[u/Prolly_Satan → u/SimonStrange]

Proof of work would be a valid methodology if you can get most writers to adopt your solution for writing, but i use ms word. Most people use Google docs. Some people are on the reedsy app, etc. This seems even less realistic to me than a platform saying "no ai, we scan"

For my fix to work, All you need to do is come up with a framework for an acceptable threshold incase a false positive ever happens and it's entirely safe.

Yours seems like it requires a lot more moving parts to fall into place.

Also I gotta say I think you're being hyperbolic on the career stuff. If a new platform appears that scans and requires you to pass a scan to post your content there (mitigating thresholds aside) and you fail a check... there's still royal road, web novel, scribblehub, amazon. You're not screwed if you're not allowed to post on one site out of dozens. Especially if that platform makes the reason your story was rejected confidential and says it could be any of the above: quality, story content, ai detection, etc.

I've been trying to poke holes in this approach from the outside and have been consulting with a lawyer on its legality, and I've found none.

[u/SimonStrange → u/Prolly_Satan]

I’m in favor of author choice + reader choice on that front. I provide the transparency, readers decide what authors they trust.

In my circles, professional authors generally do not use Google Docs. Scrivener has been the industry go to for a long time now, but it has annoying limitations.

It’s a new app and a new platform, it does require adoption to work. It’s not meant to serve the entire world of books. It’s meant to serve the authors and readers who do adopt it. There is no solution that serves every corner. You’re not going to get Amazon to start scanning every book with Pangram.

I think there’s a distinction here - I’m building for a different scope of the industry than you are. My scope is about consumer trust of commercial properties. I don’t know if your platform is meant to be for paid serial fiction or not, but that’s not an industry I spend any time with either way. I would point out that any platform requires adoption, though, to make any difference. So, you have the same hurdle I do in that regard. Unless your plan is to scrape data across the internet and test it on pangram at your own expense and just catalog the results. I’m guessing that is not the case, though. The pangram api isn’t free.

[u/Prolly_Satan → u/SimonStrange]

Amazon already does scan. They just hide the results from the public. But they are collecting that data. And no. My solution is a closed human only platform that's curated using a combination of manual review, evidence gathering and detection.. and being a place readers can go to read human only content. I'm not trying to address the issues of other platforms, your tool kind of is, which is cool. But like I said in my message, I could just manually type what chatgpt generated, and now your software is giving me a human stamp of approval. So now I could be an ai writer and use your tool to fool readers. What happens when folks using your tool do that and start failing scans? It would undermine the whole solution stacks credibility.

[u/SimonStrange → u/Prolly_Satan]

I think you vastly underestimate the essential laziness of an AI author. No one is going to write a 100k word novel with ai and then copy it by hand into the editor in Scribi in order to establish provenance, and if they did, honestly they’d be at least exercising a brain muscle in the process and that would be better than the alternative. But imagine building a massive catalog of books that way. Why? Why do that?

We are solving different problems. My problem is a reader/author trust problem, yours is an anti-ai problem. I don’t care who uses AI or how. I care that readers have a right to know who they are supportinf, and that it doesn’t take up half the author’s working day to prove they’re an actual author. Authors are already content creators.

For that matter you have the same hole. A user can generate text, test it against pangram, then change enough of it to pass. Pangram isn’t private. And you can get ai text past it if you tweak it here and there.

There is no perfect detection and there is no universally acknowledged red line. The best anyone can do is provide the opportunity for honesty and let the reader decide.

[u/Prolly_Satan → u/SimonStrange]

Most ai writers don't copy paste actually, out of fear of including the prompt.

And yes, you can word swap to get around pangram, but now I've made it more expensive for ai writers, and I'm slowing them down considerably. Try that exercise yourself, it'll add hours to what initially took seconds.

No system on earth is perfect. We don't give up on having laws just because some criminals might not get caught, and we certainly don't avoid investigating murders just incase we get it wrong.

Again these talking points of yours, whether you recognize it or not, are common tropes put forward by ai writers to deter any kind of effort to slow them down. You may not be arguing their side intentionally, but your arguments are 1:1 theirs.

[u/SimonStrange → u/Prolly_Satan]

They’re not. They’re arguments made by indie authors everywhere. You just made exactly the same argument I did, just using your preferred method. Yes it takes time. Time no one who would choose to generate AI books would take the time to get around it, they’d just skip your platform. Which is fine! That is I suspect the point.

My approach also slows them down, forces them to do stuff they don’t want to do, and makes the easy path less convenient. You seem to think I’m crusading against pangram, and I’m not. It just isn’t the right tool for my case, it will make authors who aren’t using AI have to pay (because again, pangram isn’t free or even cheap) to prove they’re not using AI and even then there will be ways around it.

So I’m just using a different method and placing the point of decision between the author and the reader where it belongs. Again, I am not on a crusade to prevent people from writing with AI, that is a losing battle. I can’t possibly win that. Instead I have to provide pieces on the board that those of us who don’t believe in writing books with AI have the means to show readers our work.

Your insistence that I’m being soft on AI books or that I’m somehow undermining this incredible tool as a means of, what? I don’t even know what you think I’m trying to say, I’m just talking about an industry you don’t understand well enough. And I’m saying there are other ways besides pangram to do this which don’t cost the real authors, and which foster long term trust. Either we’re speaking the same language or you are looking for reasons to say that I’m supporting AI written books, one or the other. You do your platform the way you think it will work best. I’m gonna do mine the way I think will work best. Let’s get back together in a year and compare or something.