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Authors are accidentally leaving AI prompts in their novels

404media.co

31–40 of 77 posts

Re: Authors are accidentally leaving AI prompts in their novels

#31
post #2

https://www.404media.co/authors-are-accidentally-leaving-ai-... > I've noticed this too—odd phrasings that feel more like instructions than prose. It reminds me of early spellcheck glitches, but creepier. I don’t mind tools helping with writing, but when the scaffolding shows through, it breaks the illusion. It’s like seeing stage directions mid-performance. I wonder how many of these slips we’re not catching, especi…

I might have fallen for it if not for the em-dash.

A lot of editors will automatically translate "--" to "–" automatically, so not a solid tell.

Re: Authors are accidentally leaving AI prompts in their novels

#33

This should be the job of the editor, no? Authors could also leave in typos or previous draft sentences, etc.

The editors are probably using AI too.

Or MS-Word autocorrect. I recently read a self-published book where the daughter of the author was the editor. While the book was nicely done and well written, what to me seemed obvious auto-corrects were painful for being the wrong word in the context of the sentence.

Editors needs to check the auto-corrections AND have language skills AND attention to detail. It is easy to ruin the reading experience.

Re: Authors are accidentally leaving AI prompts in their novels

#34
The author who is quoted in the article throwing someone else under the bus is especially gross (and very unbelievable),

> Faris denied she used AI in a post on Instagram and blamed a proofreader. “I wrote Rogue Souls entirely on myown [sic],” the April 17 post said. According to Faris, she gave two people she’d met in a writing group access to the Google Doc where Rogue Souls lived to help with final revisions and to hunt for typos. She said one of them used AI to fix sentences without her knowledge. “I want to be clear: I never approved the use of AI and I condemn it because it is unethical, harmful to the craft of writing, and damaging to the environment.”

> Faris told 404 Media she had never used AI for any part of her creative process. “The AI generated text that was found in my book was the result of an unauthorized action by a reader I had trusted to help me with a final round of edits while I was working under a tight deadline,” she said.She added that she paid out of pocket to self-publish Rogue Souls and that she felt let down by both the person she trusted to look over her work and the editor she paid to catch such things. “This experience has been a hard learned lesson,” she said. “I no longer share my manuscript with anyone. My trust in others has been permanently altered. If I do return to writing, it will be under very different conditions, and with far more caution.”

Re: Authors are accidentally leaving AI prompts in their novels

#35
post #34

The author who is quoted in the article throwing someone else under the bus is especially gross (and very unbelievable), > Faris denied she used AI in a post on Instagram and blamed a proofreader. “I wrote Rogue Souls entirely on myown [sic],” the April 17 post said. According to Faris, she gave two people she’d met in a writing group access to the Google Doc where Rogue Souls lived to help with final revisions and t…

Show us the Google document changelogs if this is the case!

Re: Authors are accidentally leaving AI prompts in their novels

#36
post #34

The author who is quoted in the article throwing someone else under the bus is especially gross (and very unbelievable), > Faris denied she used AI in a post on Instagram and blamed a proofreader. “I wrote Rogue Souls entirely on myown [sic],” the April 17 post said. According to Faris, she gave two people she’d met in a writing group access to the Google Doc where Rogue Souls lived to help with final revisions and t…

Show us the Google document changelogs if this is the case!

Great point. This would be very easy to prove.

Re: Authors are accidentally leaving AI prompts in their novels

#37
post #8

"authors"

Is a mid-century paperback author, who published several books a year (100+ over their career) with the same plot, less of an "author" than someone who publishes a handful of original works over their career? Literary slop long predates AI.

Some authors like pG Wodehouse could slop out the same story over and over and over again (boy meets girl, elder aunt doesn’t like it, boy gets girl) and yet each one is unique and interesting.

Meanwhile other authors shovel out the exact same story (I found literal cut and paste more than once).

Re: Authors are accidentally leaving AI prompts in their novels

#38
I remember studying using a German translation of a textbook (at a German uni, and all the English originals were checked out). After a few chapters the sentences stopped making sense. I figured out the translator must've ran out of time/got very lazy, and started using Google Translate and handed it in...

Re: Authors are accidentally leaving AI prompts in their novels

#39
post #7

"authors"

Whose reaction to being caught being sloppy is, puzzlingly, to scramble for the righteous ground of victimhood… > Faris said she’d faced a wave of harassment online after the incident and has taken a step back from social media. “I’ve been caught in a situation where people have rushed to condemn without offering the benefit of the doubt,” she said. “And while many were quick to accuse me of knowingly using AI, very…

I might be just impressionable and naive, but if this is a false narrative, apart from me just finding it rather believable, it's also a surprisingly falsifiable one:

> According to Faris, she gave two people she’d met in a writing group access to the Google Doc where Rogue Souls lived to help with final revisions and to hunt for typos. She said one of them used AI to fix sentences without her knowledge. “I want to be clear: I never approved the use of AI and I condemn it because [of the usual talking points...]

She could just publish the Google Docs document for people to review the edit history of. Not a Google Workspaces whiz, but my impression is that edit history is immutably retained, so unless one could reasonably speculate Google being in on the con, this would conclusively prove (support) her version of the story, particularly if the timelines work out. I wonder if she'd also have a legal case against the person who made the change.

Re: Authors are accidentally leaving AI prompts in their novels

#40

This should be the job of the editor, no? Authors could also leave in typos or previous draft sentences, etc.

The editors are probably using AI too.

My next SaaS-startup is "Use AI to detect AI-slop! Detect prompts and LLM responses that someone forgot to delete! Fix em-dashes!".

Anyone want to give me a billion dollars?

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