111–120 of 141 posts
This will work for a little while but this can't go on indefinitely: no one is going to want to stick to 30+ year old books. We should probably work on developing standards for what we want in a book instead of clinging to a losing position.
And there might be no way to prove you really wrote something Post-2022. I wrote a long article, all by hand. I never used any LLMs, even for searching. I checked it with a couple of AI detection tools and they confidently said that 60% of the article was written by AI.
I highly doubt there is any mainstream search engine that doesn't use any LLM like technology in the backend to provide search results.
> I checked it with a couple of AI detection tools and they confidently said that 60% of the article was written by AI.
These tools are as reliable as the polygraph. I have seen passages from books published before 1900 getting a 90% likelihood of being AI generated from these tools. At the end of the day there are only so many ways to write a grammatically correct sentence and if an AI can write it, chances are some human somewhere already did.
You are not alone. I like to read Harry Potter fan fiction [1] and I have started checking the publication date when Im searching for something new to read. I started doing this passively and realized it after the fact. Have you ever met someone who could say all and do the right things but never made you feel anything, or your gut was sensing an ulterior motive? It's a magic trick we are all bewitched by at some poi…
It was profoundly alienating to see hundreds of people liking and commenting on chapters of obviously AI-generated prose full of LLM-isms and broken metaphors and similes - and these 'authors' have the gall to link a patreon account and ask for money for this tripe!
This will work for a little while but this can't go on indefinitely: no one is going to want to stick to 30+ year old books. We should probably work on developing standards for what we want in a book instead of clinging to a losing position.
> no one is going to want to stick to 30+ year old books This is... satire, right? right?
I've been consciously doing that for reference books for the past three years because Amazon is absolutely littered with AI-generated non-fiction. I have my own ideological reasons too, but the main problem is that most of that AI-generated reference stuff is just of incredibly poor quality. It's meant to saturate the platform as cheaply as possible, so no one actually does any fact-checking, editing, layout, and so…
Low-background Steel: content without AI contamination (2025)
I honestly find this a little deranged. I’ve read some AI generated prose before and it’s… boring. It tends to be the mathematical average of all stories, with plots that are heavy on cliche and tropes played straight. If I read a book like that it’s probably just going to be a bad book that I don’t finish. Humans write lots of boring bad books too. Eventually artists will figure out how to use AI to make real art th…
A few years ago, I finally decided to read Romeo & Juliet. I was disappointed to discover that it was full of cliches and tropes.
There are still plenty of us writing the book start to finish with all our own words and plots, it is very tempting to use AI to get the cover art correct, but going to a cover artist will these days likely get you the same "AI assisted" creation. I do have one freely downloadble Sci-Fi book from 2022 which took 10 years in total to write so it might safely pass all your standards, but if a fixed cut off date is your…
If it's any consolation, I'm releasing a technical book on Java this year. In 2026. When AI exists and, at according to the front page most days, programming is "solved." All of it was written by hand because, well, why else would I bother? What's the point of a craft when you're not the one doing it? Half the joy is getting better at it, and that requires doing.
It's demoralizing to know post-2022 books are devalued in people's minds. It's demoralizing that I also think that way. I spend enough time at work reading other people's copy/pasted LLM output. Books should be a relief from that world, but the risk is unavoidable unless you go back in time.
But hopefully good things rise above the noise. If they don't, it's still OK. Honing a craft is its own reward, even if not celebrated. (this is the lie I tell myself as I lay in bed awake realizing I've wasted that last several years of my life)
Perhaps we need a 2022 version of this site https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappened2012.com/
I hate slop as much as anyone else and was, until recently, absolute in my zero tolerance of any LLM use in personal posts and correspondence. Now I've adopted a slightly more nuanced view because I sometimes use an LLM when writing but only in a couple very limited, narrowly focused ways. The first is trying to remember a specific turn of phrase I can't recall at the moment (when you get past 50 this happens a bit m…
(as an aside, I also struggle with super long sentences and found a pretty good trick for curing it: rewrite by hand with pen and paper. My cramping hand finds entire passages that the work can survive without)