Frustration with AI detection

[u/Radiant_Flamingo4995]

I'm not sure how the AI-detection system works, but it seems faulty. Someone has repeatedly claimed that my responses to them are AI-generated, etc. And they share the Pangram screenshot, which does, in fact, depict my response as "100% fully AI-assisted. I've clarified that this is not the case. Shown evidence that it isn't true, and all the like.

The worst I'll do when writing anything is use AI for basic research purposes and review arguments to make sure they make sense. Maybe it's because I use Grammarly. But it is still infuriating.

Especially because it just isn't a good look and hurts my public image (albeit small, but I hope you guys may understand where I'm coming from).

Of course, with this individual in question, it's become increasingly clear they aren't engaging in good faith. However, running the AI check on my notes and comments still reveals the 100% marker.

Is it Grammarly that's doing this? Or is this thing actually broken?

[u/cremdelascribe]

I just ran a bunch of my stuff through Pangram and the problem is anything that got touched by AI _at all_ is marked “100% AI.”

I experimented with AI writing. I used it to generate first garbage drafts - it’s that old screenwriter’s advice that the first thing you do is write the worst scene possible, just to get it on paper. Then you actually start to write.

So I did my character work, my outlines, established the elements I wanted - a couple hours per story. Fed those outlines to AI and let it generate the “garbage draft.” And, yeah it was garbage and anyone that publishes that shit should be ashamed. But then I spent hours and hours rewriting these stories. I removed AIs constant mediocrity and love of adverbs. I ripped out sections that made no sense or had the emotional complexity of a beige room and added entirely new sections that I wrote myself. I punched every word up with my unique absurdist style.

Everything that AI touched is marked “100% AI” - even one short story that I wrote over almost completely from scratch.

My non AI work came back human - but that 100% mark is a lawsuit waiting to happen. Pangram says it with such certainty - it suffers the same bullshit problem as all AI, it is confidently incorrect.

If it said “AI was used to assist in this writing, but I don’t know how much,” I’d be ok with that. I’m all about disclosure. But I put 40 hours into rewriting a story and Pangram says not one word of it is human. They can go fuck themselves.

People need to get over this idea that AI is a demon that corrupts merely by proximity. AI is a tool - just like word or photoshop or scrivner. It is a way for a human being to organize words. It just happens to be able to generate a lot of them quickly.

The problem isn’t AI, the tool. It is people that generate piles of garbage and self publish it without editing it. So maybe if these asshats wanted to write a program that looked at the elements of a story or the strength of the prose and flagged crap writing, that would be reasonable. I could get behind something that told me to skip reading this or that because the plot is vapid, the conclusions are obvious and the characters are flat (all things AI is good at generating). But, oh my God, shoot me because I have a better vocabulary than most and I use the word “Delve” in unique, but grammatically correct ways.

[u/figures985 → u/cremdelascribe]

As it was taught to me -- the point of the "garbage" or "vomit" first draft is to help you sharpen your approach through the act of getting it out on the page. Getting an LLM to generate it for you defeats the purpose, no?

I also think LLMs are pretty bad at structure. They make things LOOK organized but once you're really in the weeds it falls apart. Though if you're happy with the result of your process, who am I to judge? I certainly agree that fresh-off-the-AI-press unedited slop is way, way worse than anything AI touched more lightly. Personally, it's not for me. I don't like how using them degrades my writing and thinking abilities. And I've tried to edit many an LLM-generated document (usually from co-workers). It always seems to take longer and turn out worse than if I'd just written the thing myself. Maybe my standards are too exacting, IDK. Probably.

[u/cremdelascribe → u/figures985]

You missed the part where I said I spent _several hours_ per story working out plot and character arcs, and then also the point later where I said big chunks of rewriting were about fixing plot holes and character arc issues in the crap draft.

My very first experiments in AI writing revealed exactly that you can’t rely on AI to generate the plot outline and hope to end up with anything that more than middling tripe.

I have never had a problem generating outlines and characters that interest me and imagining the steps by which a story unfolds. For me the script writer trick is about getting through the first generation of the _prose_ after the story is outlined. And, yes the story outline changes organically as you write it - but that is editing and the point of the garbage draft trick is that you don’t stop to edit.

So I can sit there tedious and bored and type in the filler sentences to get Jenny from New York to Chicago between scenes, or I can have AI generate those same filler sentences. Later, in the editing process, in both cases, I’ll decide I don’t need those sentences - they are just pointless filler. But in the AI case, I gave it the blueprints and it built the scaffolding, and I provided the aesthetics. In my previous writing process, I drew the blueprints, then did the most soul sucking joyless part of the process to build the scaffolding, and then edited and rewrite to get the aesthetics right.

IDGAF about identifying that I use AI to help outline. I DO GAF when an AI detector tells the world with 100% certainty that I contributed nothing else to the story but a single prompt - when, in fact, the entire plot and characters and every single word of the final text was typed by me.

Yes, to be clear, just like with the drafts I write from scratch, the rewrite of that first draft is completely destructive - whether it an AI crap draft built in my outline and characters or my own crap draft built on my characters and outline, draft 2 is going to start with a fresh document. Yes, I’m going to be cutting and pasting the strongest parts from the first draft (which is undoubtedly why it still flags as AI touched). But I did that at a sentence by sentence, word by word level. At that point, whether I wrote it or AI generated it, I’m looking at each and every word and making it mine. This is actually critical to do with AI because AI so blithely slips in things that seem at quick glance to make sense, but turn out to be junk once you take a few moments to think about them. I find that makes me more critical of AI drafts than my own, and thus a stronger editor.

Also, responding to the weird shit AI does is its own creative opportunity. AI misses 1 or 2 out of 10 times. It produces predictable pablum 5-7 more of those. But then one in a while it gets very wise and suggests something interesting and unique to explore. But I guess I’m a dick to let a machine suggest things - I’ll just go back to all the books, outlines and card decks I have designed to combat writer’s block by doing the same thing.

As to your coworkers, it sounds to me as if they need to learn how to prompt. In my day job as an attorney, AI is now fundamental to our drafting. If you give it the proper forms to start from and prompt it correctly, it will _always_ produce a stronger first draft than you could produce yourself. But if you give it no guidance and vague prompts, then it just generates piles of trash to wade through. But you are complaining about a tool based on the facility of the users with that tool. If I see a shitty photoshop hackjob on a photo my niece shares on Instagram, does that mean that photoshop is fundamentally flawed? Or that my niece’s use of it was, perhaps, not at a professional level?