If the prose is not the same as LLM, then all is good.
It is not that it is bad prose, it is that we read it everywhere.
We got LLM prose fatigue.
I'm Scared a Stranger Will Call My Novel AI, So I Built GitHub for Words
21–30 of 67 posts
Re: I'm Scared a Stranger Will Call My Novel AI, So I Built GitHub for Words
#22My spidey sense is tingling with this post. If someone was really scared that their text would be assumed to be AI, why wouldnt you at least stop using the obvious AI-sign, i.e. the long dashes? Does the meaning of the text really change that much that you MUST use — instead of - ?
Also: * No dashes before the 'its not vibe coding post' (or very rare), afterwards lots of dashes. * All pixel art images are AI generated.
Re: I'm Scared a Stranger Will Call My Novel AI, So I Built GitHub for Words
#23> That map makes it stupidly easy to tell a human from a machine. Someone who commits 50,000 lines in an afternoon did not type those by hand. Someone doing a couple hundred? Probably real. Simple. Uh, this isn't true, though? I squash commits all the time locally before I publish them. There can be many reasons for that, but at the end of the day, I'm not obligated to share my messy revision history with the world.…
It's also possible to break the 50,000 lines up into multiple commits and fake the commit dates, so this does nothing to prove a human wrote them.
Yea there's literally software that lets you put art into your commit history blog graph on github by making a repo with potentially tens of thousands of dummy commits.
Re: I'm Scared a Stranger Will Call My Novel AI, So I Built GitHub for Words
#24My spidey sense is tingling with this post. If someone was really scared that their text would be assumed to be AI, why wouldnt you at least stop using the obvious AI-sign, i.e. the long dashes? Does the meaning of the text really change that much that you MUST use — instead of - ? Also: * No dashes before the 'its not vibe coding post' (or very rare), afterwards lots of dashes. * All pixel art images are AI generate…
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Re: I'm Scared a Stranger Will Call My Novel AI, So I Built GitHub for Words
#25I don't see what this offers that Git doesn't. Even if Git only tracks lines, that's still a good proxy of how many words you wrote. Besides, you can use git diff to see whether an individual character was changed, even if the number of lines stayed the same.
Re: I'm Scared a Stranger Will Call My Novel AI, So I Built GitHub for Words
#26I'm a little confused in that this post is either (partially?) AI-generated or deliberately written to appear so (including to Pangram).
I'm a self-confessed AI hater and yet I agree with the "just write your thing" people on this one. I've watched this play out on Substack and I think there's a mix of a) people genuinely scared of what I believe to be very rare false positives from automatic detection, b) people who use AI (but claim otherwise) trying to use group (a) as cover to argue against automatic detection, and c) the hoi polloi throwing rotting fruit at anyone who uses an em dash.
You can safely ignore group (c); they aren't going to be your people even with a fully-attested human changelog witnessed by the Pope and encoded on the blockchain. Group (b) are basically grifters and also to be ignored. Group (a)'s concerns are valid but in the large I don't see a lot of "grey area" writing online; I see a lot of obvious slop. (Possibly the well-done AI assistance goes unnoticed by me, in which case - philosophical concerns aside - I can only think of the old XKCD comic about spam bots - mission accomplished? I don't think so, though.)
Back to the OP, I didn't really understand the "meet the enemy" section - did that experiment go anywhere? My results from trying to see if even frontier models can capture voice, style, philosophy from my own technical writing corpus have been terrible to laughable at best.
Re: I'm Scared a Stranger Will Call My Novel AI, So I Built GitHub for Words
#27I recognize myself in that I build instead of publish.
This is just fear of rejection, in productivity-clothing.
The only way to publish, or to get published, is to put yourself out there.
You risk rejection and ridicule. But life is not a spectator sport.
Re: I'm Scared a Stranger Will Call My Novel AI, So I Built GitHub for Words
#28I think the only way to really prove you wrote something is a camera streaming video and audio from a faraday caged room, and a program like this recording each keystroke
Then you can upload that to a private repo after each session.
Otherwise people make a program an agent can use to type and retype whole sections like a person
Re: I'm Scared a Stranger Will Call My Novel AI, So I Built GitHub for Words
#29My spidey sense is tingling with this post. If someone was really scared that their text would be assumed to be AI, why wouldnt you at least stop using the obvious AI-sign, i.e. the long dashes? Does the meaning of the text really change that much that you MUST use — instead of - ? Also: * No dashes before the 'its not vibe coding post' (or very rare), afterwards lots of dashes. * All pixel art images are AI generate…
> why wouldnt you at least stop using the obvious AI-sign, i.e. the long dashes
Em-dashes have a long literary history, which is where AI got them from, and they're genuinely useful in writing. We shouldn't let LLMs ruin that for us in literature. The fact that they've historically been less common in online writing is in part because of deficiencies in input systems, though they're easy enough to type with a compose key or similar, or a typesetting system that interprets `---` as `—`.
Re: I'm Scared a Stranger Will Call My Novel AI, So I Built GitHub for Words
#30Interestingly hackernews commenters are the main reason of this fear