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Authors are accidentally leaving AI prompts in their novels

404media.co

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Re: Authors are accidentally leaving AI prompts in their novels

#41

Post by Arubis »

arrowsmith wrote: post #27
delichon wrote: 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.

Ergh. My muscle memory is to use Opt+- with great frequency. Presumably that means folks will start to flag my stuff as generated.

Re: Authors are accidentally leaving AI prompts in their novels

#42

Post by lostlogin »

card_zero wrote: post #6
delichon wrote: 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…

This AI even commented based on the title and didn't RTFA, very realistic HN post.

What if this is a human pretending to write as an AI, and they did in fact read the article?

Re: Authors are accidentally leaving AI prompts in their novels

#43

Post by neilv »

Generative AI outputs are on a spectrum of plagiarism.

Sometimes the only thing you can say is that it was using a statistical model that was trained on unclear legal ground.

Other times, you have people pushing the limits:

> It appeared as if author, Lena McDonald, had used an AI to help write the book, asked it to imitate the style of another author, and left behind evidence they’d done so in the final work.

One argument against this is that not only are you not doing the work that you pass off under your name/brand, but (rather than a ghost-writer) you're doing it using a tool that stochastically copies bits of other copyrighted material, and there's smoking-gun evidence right there that you're telling it to focus that mechanical copying from a specific other author.

This is arguably plagiarism, and one of the few counterarguments is to confuse the judge with the Uber defense. ("But it's an app! So your outmoded 'laws' and 'rules' do not apply to me! Because technology! Checkmate!")

Re: Authors are accidentally leaving AI prompts in their novels

#44

Post by SoftTalker »

arrowsmith wrote: post #27
delichon wrote: 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.

I actually spent some time learning when to use em and en dashes as opposed to hyphens and I'm disappointed that this might make people think I use AI to write.

Re: Authors are accidentally leaving AI prompts in their novels

#46

Post by elaus »

Arubis wrote: post #41
arrowsmith wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Ergh. My muscle memory is to use Opt+- with great frequency. Presumably that means folks will start to flag my stuff as generated.

Yeah, I have been using them for many years now, but perhaps I need to stop in order to be "more human"…

Re: Authors are accidentally leaving AI prompts in their novels

#48

Post by mmooss »

rs186 wrote: post #11
delichon wrote: 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…

The em dash betrayed it, and the wording is way too elegant compared to an average HN comment.

> The em dash betrayed it

I think that's false. Do you mean, using an extual Unicode em dash code point, or using a dash in a sentence. The latter is commonplace; the former is part of the autocorrect feature of many platforms and applications.

> the wording is way too elegant compared to an average HN comment

Statistically, it's apparently about average. :)

Re: Authors are accidentally leaving AI prompts in their novels

#49

Post by blooalien »

netsharc wrote: post #40
booleandilemma wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> Anyone want to give me a billion dollars?

Sold! I'll save at least twice that by firing all the human writers and editors!

Re: Authors are accidentally leaving AI prompts in their novels

#50

Post by quectophoton »

exe34 wrote: post #26
rs186 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The em dash betrayed it, and the wording is way too elegant compared to an average HN comment.

It annoys me greatly that correct punctuation can be make your work look artificially generated.

Agree, saying that an HN comment is AI-generated just because it has an em-dash, is like saying a Twitter/BlueSky/etc post (or WhatsApp message, etc) is AI-generated just because it ends the sentences with a period.

"it looked like a real message but the dot at the end gave it away"

There are similar opinions with artists too. Not too long ago I saw some saying, paraphrasing, "if an image looks legit I look for inconsistent lighting, and if that still looks good I check the artist's profile and look if they are 'too fast' [full illustration every few days] or if they have different styles".

I haven't seen anything like that with code, but I wouldn't be surprised if someone said that human-written code is actually AI-generated just because the structure looks weird to the reviewer, or because it has some "what" comments (instead of "why" comments; both have their place), or things like that.

I appreciate the skepticism, but I feel like things are being taken too far.

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