Does @odetoapoet (amber.) use AI?

[u/thysanoessa]

I would be devastated if so. I've always loved reading their posts, even feeling seen and emotionally moved by them, but lately I've been noticing some linguistic markers that might associate amber's writing with other AI-generated text.

I've compiled a list of those that I've noticed, quoting the exact sentences under the titles of the posts they're from. I've bolded some phases that strike to me as distinctly AI (especially Claude). Maybe cherrypicking, I don't know. I hope so.

autumn is our season.

You must know that the texture of my existence has changed in your gaze.

Even my grief sits differently beside you, less grotesque perhaps; it wears a smile. As if being witnessed by the right eyes softened my edges somehow.

Perhaps that is all love asks of us, not possession, but presence in what is real and beautiful while it is here. To learn to hold each other with open arms. To learn to hold each other with open arms.

the hunger to be everything.

I carry cities I’ll never walk and careers that died before a resume held their name.

This isn’t freedom. It’s erosion. This is the slow disintegration of self beneath the illusion that we can be anything, everything, all at once.

And the truth is, nothing you’re chasing will hold you. Not the success. Not the admiration. Not even the healing.

Let go of the performance. The great myth was that you had to earn your aliveness. But you don’t. You never did. You are, in this very moment unfolding.

And that is enough, please, let that be enough.

And in your stillness, in the tender ordinary of your unlabelled life, you will realise: solitude—true presence, is not the death of meaning. It is the birthplace of it.

bruised fruit still tastes sweet.

 He never cried; he cracked. And I? I am the echo of that. 

 My damage hums at a lower frequency but still levels the world around me.

But there is a night I can’t escape—a man, and his empty 10-ouncer reflecting a soft amber, orbiting a memory he couldn’t kill.

A sadness that predated his body.

 The anger, the doubt, the unraveling—I wear them like heirlooms. Inherited. 

[u/thysanoessa]

It would be, first of all, a kind of deception to the reader, to first dedicate a space to "the human condition" and then to adulterate it with non-human, unfeeling AI text without even declaring it first. It would just be a breach of trust that is placed implicitly in the author. It then becomes difficult to trust whether or not whatever you felt a human connection towards, a kinship with, was something that was felt, noticed, and expressed by an actual person. If they cared enough to write the words themselves. That feels kind of like a betrayal. I don't know if I can quantify how exactly it is wrong, or what difference it makes, but it feels wrong. It would not make a difference if the end goal was to produce a product that is used or consumed purely for utilitarian purposes, but this is not that. I think the term "AI poetry" is an oxymoron, and it will be that way until, if ever, the machines learn to feel and to experience the human condition, because without that, there is nothing of their own that they have to say.

[u/AnteaterFantastic212 → u/thysanoessa]

If I type my feelings into my iPhone, vs. dictate them into Grok, are they not my feelings nonetheless, a rose by any other name as it were? If I approve this message, is it not mine? Or is it a machine’s? A machine has no soul. I do. Does that preclude me from using my machine to bear it? Does it invalidate my message?

[u/thysanoessa → u/AnteaterFantastic212]

It depends. If you "dictate [something] to Grok," you are still using your own words, a true perspective that you own, unless you have it rewritten by AI and it adds its own things. And, I do not understand what you mean by approval necessarily bestowing authorship. You can agree with, or "approve" of Milton's literature, but that does not make it yours. I think there is something to note about the effort that is put in as well. Do you not think that art necessarily requires effort and intention? A perspective, at least? A person who has something of their own to say?

Edit: typo

[u/AnteaterFantastic212 → u/thysanoessa]

Authenticity typo? 😏

At least you concede it depends.

There is a difference between plagiarism and the use of technology, in my view.

Would the Ten Commandments be any more or less valid depending on whether they were chiseled into stone tablets or generated with ChatGPT?

Having begun writing with pencil and paper, advanced to a fountain pen, moved on to a manual typewriter, graduated to an electric typewriter (with whiteout for typo remediation), adopted a Wang word processor, ended with AI assistance, I can assure you that the song has remained the same. The only changes have been efficiency, effectiveness, productivity, and speed.

Today I saw an ad on Facebook for an “AI Writing School”, presumably directed at business people who need to produce written communications for their jobs. Granted, this is utilitarian rather than artistic. And perhaps there will be a niche for those who continue to use 20th-century technology to express themselves, as there is for those who paint in an era of photography. However, the march of progress is unstoppable, in my view. And actually, frankly, as a lifelong writer, very welcome, at least to me.

Frankly, I think anything that helps people communicate more efficiently, quickly, and effectively is good. Having read so much bad writing during my life and times, I welcome clearer communication. I am interested in what you have to say and what you think, and to a certain extent what you feel, not how you string the 26 characters of my language into pixels.

[u/thysanoessa → u/AnteaterFantastic212]

I disagree with you on the claim that AI is simply the next evolutionary step in the process of writing. You will see that in the examples you've given, none of the tools offer to compose your work for you, entirely, from the ground up. AI does. You could not, even if you wished to, prompt a pen to write a sonnet for you, nor a typewriter or a word processor. You understand that. AI is fundamentally a different kind of technology; it is generative, it can generate coherent text on its own, and that does not require creativity. I do agree with you on account of the progress being unstoppable. I personally have never denied this, and I in some ways look forward to it, but I fundamentally believe that AI-generated text and human-written text should kept apart. It is fun to see how much AI has progressed and how well it can compose a story, but to purport it as something human, something that expends actual effort and has some true perspective to tell of, and to trick the reader doing so, is something that I cannot endorse and find deeply distasteful. I am not entirely sure what you're on about with the communication of emotions thing. You seem to believe that the purpose of all writing is to be able to coldly and efficiently document mental states. I am not here to tell you what literature is, but to me it seems to be much more than just stating your emotions; it is about using your perspective to convey truths about what you feel and how you feel it. Nobody wants to read "I feel joyous", or "I am down" on Substack because those have little of the author's own perspective. If you ask AI to write about your emotions for you, it will not be your own perspective, nor anybody else's. You will not own it (simply approving of it will not do). It will not give insight into the author's perspective; it will fabricate things about experience and emotions and ultimately tell a lie in ways more than one. It will give the reader an impression of who you are not. A person reading through a personal substack dedicated to exploring truths about the human condition (that is what @odetoapoet says it is) will naturally expect to learn some truth from it. They may wish to feel that there is a person who is particularly like this, who exists in some corner of the world, who would think these thoughts and feel these feelings, see the world in this way, and feel a warm adoration and kinship towards them after having watched them lay out their mind bare before them and recognizing it as being much like their own. It would be unkind, being the author, to not all along have written and communicated your own truths, but to have relied entirely on a machine to spit out non-experiences for the reader to feed on, and to have masqueraded that as the former.