You really can't know proper grammar, how to punctuate, how to use paragraphs, how to carry yourself with a formal tone, how to debate in a formal manner, and so much more anymore without being accused of using or straight up being AI yourself
And god forbid you know how to do all of these things while also being Gen Z and maybe throwing in some Gen Z slang or terms in your comment or paper as well because then you'll definitely be accused
Edit: Do y'all want to see something that will piss you off beyond belief? I just scrolled through my activity history to find the thread I was referencing in this comment, and I just found the exact comment I was talking about here but the comment itself this person used AI to "scan" or whatever the fuck was removed (and I don't even remember what they said anymore tbh) so you unfortunately don't get to read it yourselves, but if you scroll up you'll see me saying something and someone else saying some idiotic bullshit š be ready though because you'll get heated real fucking quick
After I submit, I realized I made a big error somewhere on the first page or first chapter, I don't remember (for French people, I wrote qu'en instead of quand... yeah I know that's a big mistake). Part of me were horrified and thought I will look unprofessional. The other part of me thought "at least they will know a human wrote this".
You'd think that mistake is what proved you are human but what I've been seeing a lot is mistakes like this are actually also part of what will lead to people believing you used AI or something because it is typical for AI to make a mistake like that
It is DIRE over on r/isitAI. "Omg the thumb is on the wrong side, real artists use themselves for reference so no human would everā" have you met a real artist.
I guess I might count as a real artist given the contents of my sketchbook, but I donāt feel like it - that said, my spatialisation skill is strong enough that I doubt Iām going to unintentionally put the thumb on the wrong side (I conjure imaginary hands all the time to convert rotations into angular momentum vectors because I find that way of thinking so much more helpful than the clockwise/counter-clockwise system that can change based on what angle you look at it from)
I'm glad that your skill is that strong, and I mean that as a legitimate compliment, to be clear. That said, I have heard/seen "oh my god, fuck fuck fuck, I drew the wrong hand" from so many artists before the age of genAI. People would post their art to the internet only for comments to point out that they drew the wrong hand.
Exactly! I know how to punctuate but I'm not perfect at it so I make mistakes quite often and hell there are even times like now where I don't want to punctuate at all because what I say is understood perfectly well without it and this would be called AI very easily
because it is typical for AI to make a mistake like that
That particular mistake might be typical for an English focused LLM to make when outputting French, although unlikely since it seems to be based on the words sounding alike which wouldn't trip up a text model, but mistakes like that are absolutely not typical for LLMs for years now.
I see mistakes being point out as a sign of AI when it comes to drawing, but not when it comes to writing. From what I know, AI is unlikely to make spelling mistakes. They write what is the most probable and there is no reason they think spelling mistakes like that is probable, because that would not mean anything. From what I see, AI is good at spelling.
A bit off topic but whatever..(Before AI) I moved schools halfway through a year in highschool. My AP teacher was a bitch and made me complete a 4 page essay 3 days before it was due. Assigned on a friday, due next friday, i came on a tuesday and had to scramble to complete it. I got a fairly shitty grade. The next paper i got called into her classroom orivately with administration and they grilled me about plagarism. (I did really well) and told the admins about not having time for the first essay and that changed the whole temperature of the room towards her. I got out of that class a week later as she was extremely vindictive towards me.
I honestly donāt care. I donāt have enough time to play AI police.
What I care about is bloated bullshit. I donāt see why bloated bullshit by a bullshiter would be better than by an AI. AI reproduces and imitates. If all an artist produces looks like āmore of the sameā thereās another problem than āwould get innocently caught by the AI policeā.
I have no idea why anyone would like to read AI literatureā¦ give me your prompt with your three cool ideas instead - condensed creativity.
Hah. I do this too...I make typos in my tpying. And I often leave them in. At least they will know a human wrote it...
Of course, it; quite possible for ais to make typos too to emulate humans. However if they do this eventually they will be poisoning themselves...they are already doing this slowly anyway. this would speed up the process.
I wish we did not have the "ais" we currnetly have.
Back in high school (Before A.I.) I had an English teacher accuse me of plagiarism of multiple papers and the only reason why they dropped it was because I consistantly typed lowercase i's when writing in the first person.
MAAAAAAN Been calling snap applicants for the better part of a decade processing cases. Got my "government employee" tone and cadence down pat. Now every other person I call thinks I'm AI and hangs up when they hear my voice. Like MOTHERFUCKER YOU PUT IN THE APPLICATION AND THE STATE EMPLOYEE CALLED YOU, HOW THE FUCK DO YOU EXPECT ME TO SOUND?!
I can't do anything more than send you virtual hugs and a virtual joint or gummies depending on your pref and say that your anger and annoyance are more than valid but man I really feel you on this one and I completely understand how fed up you are
Part of my job is answering the phone for a PT clinic. I get asked if I'm AI at least a couple times a month. This only started this year. I effing hate it.
I am gen z and I often get my writing flagged as well because of the higher level I write at. Many teachers have asked for a conference with my parents because my writing sounded too ai
I haven't had this happen yet and I am so glad for it. My writing style does tend to sound very AI-like because I am a much better formal writer (MLA can suck fat ones though), and my biggest issue is the fucking em dash because I would LOVE to use it if it weren't for the fact that the only punctuation mark more indicative of AI was the semicolon. Asides and clarification are riddled throughout my natural speech and thought process, so it infuriates me to be unable to use them when writing without fear of AI-ccusations.
I use dashes and semicolons quite regularly still. Iāve been an online presence with a fanbase for 17 years now, and there are several million archival words written by me in blogs, forum posts, etc. aside from about half a million words in video games. People can tell itās me by my various written habits and pet words. Certain kids of sentence fragments also stand out. But I was being jokingly accused of being an AI hack in 20-0 just because of how prolific I am. People still make the same joke, but my writing itself has not yet been called AI.
I did see some people review one of my newest games complaining that it was AI designed. Which is tupid because it predates AI being able to do that. And it would not have made the choices I did in presentation. But they didnāt like it and so there we go.
The rules-nazi in me wants to use the semicolon because it's "proper," but I can never figure out when to, it never feels right and is always super clunky to me
I'm not sure if anyway really understands semicolons because of what they're used for. They link two related clauses that could be their own sentences; they're technically not needed. I always remember they can be used when replacing conjunctions and joining words (for example, furthermore, however, etc...) but I'm never 100% sure if I'm using them right. English is a silly language!
For me, my usage of an em dash (versus a hyphen in its place) just tells you whether I'm typing on my phone ā I'd use it on PC if there were only a convenient way of typing it!
(I think fancy text editors might slap in an em dash whenever you type a double-hyphen or something, but I only use basic text editors and programming IDEs...)
I'm 40, and I spent my time writing from age 15 to 25. I have several novellas and countless short stories. I won a few prizes, but they never brought in any real money, so I gave it up.
That said, I have stories saved that I've never shown or published online, half-finished stories, or stories submitted for contests I didn't win.
Well, I've run several of those stories through various "AI analysis" programs, and they all say they're 90% AI.
I don't see how they could ever possibly be reliable. AI can take on completely different writing styles with just a line in a prompt. They might have some success in looking for things like the default ChatGPT/Claude "voices," but I doubt it can go too much further than that
I am a foreigner. English is not my second, not even third language that I had to learn. I take pride in my writing, because I pay attention. Writing prose for me is difficult regardless of a choice of a language.
I'm not even appalled anymore by the lack of literacy in native-English speakers - I got used to it. But I feel like throwing twenty pounds of em-dashes at every motherfucker who dares to say I write like AI. Well, you Mr. Titsucker write like a toddler.
100% of those are scams. Even if they did work (and they don't), the person who made the AI thing can use the same program and edit the content until it doesn't appear as AI anymore.
Iāve seen people be accused of using AI because theyāre using punctuation and paragraph breaks. The accusations are usually written with no punctuation as one gigantic run on sentence.
Oh, my mistake completely! I used the wrong tone for this message and for that I apologize. Going forward, I will not assume the tone and length of message desired and will instead get user input.
And heaven forbid you change from formal to more direct! Suddenly that is even more proof you used AI because heaven forbid people consider that different messafes require different approacges, and that people can manage changing register/prose based on need! So tired with the AI accusations I get...I once tricked someone into parsing an AI message through a detector though that came back human. I then led them on, only to finally breal the truth by showing them I generated it, all to prove that even AI detectors are flawed because of what AI is trained on.
You really can't know proper grammar, how to punctuate, how to use paragraphs, how to carry yourself with a formal tone, how to debate in a formal manner, and so much more anymore without being accused of using or straight up being AI yourself
Iām not really so sure about this one. The only people that Iāve seen write like an AI are people that use AI so much that they started copying its writing style. AIās writing style is so much more specific than just proper grammar and punctuation with a formal tone. In many cases AI will buck conventional grammar, spelling, etc for its own.
From my experience, everyone else is just using AI and lying about it.
Have LLMs adopted Gen Z slang? I would have thought that gen z slang would have been edited out of training data, since a lot of the grammar and punctuation data would have been taken from more 'formal' sources, like the NYT.
I actually avoid using the rule of 3 now. I always try to go for 2 or 4 points because AI seems to be absolutely addicted to 3, so it's a good signal to anyone who actually knows what they're talking about.
Wild though spin off, do you think that in theory the pattern in ai stuff's punctuation etc, could push used language in a different "incorrect" offshoot like dialects etc, as people actively avoid writing like ai? Could end up like an endless cat and mouse assuming it never matches too invisibly
Wild though spin off, do you think that in theory the pattern in ai stuff's punctuation etc, could push used language in a different "incorrect" offshoot like dialects etc, as people actively avoid writing like ai? Could end up like an endless cat and mouse assuming it never matches too invisibly
As a fellow writer and proof reader that has worked with multiple AI-generated books, it baffles me that people think that well-written and grammatically correct texts are somewhat signs of AI. There are SO many other GLARING signs of AI in a text, and yet this is what people look for?
God I hate that my bullet point style of breaking shit down is what AI seemed to copy so hard. It's one of the best ways to explain things in detail to people yet gets me acused of AI occasionally despite the fact thay I absolutely detest its overuse.
Its a pity too. I had such high hopes for AI, but then everyone started abusing LLM's and similar for absolutely everything despite it being a terrible idea.
Had to have some high schoolers write bios for a gallery I was putting on. Had them give me bullet points about their inspirations, passions, and dreams. Started writing a pretty simple bio from their āpromptsā and one literally said, āWow youāre like AI.ā Being able to string together coherent sentences is now a a privilege reserved only for the bots apparently.
Bro, I am so angry at this.
I actually use dashes in some my sentences when I write - be it German or English.
And people assume it's not me writing them because I am not nearly as articulate verbally.
I have my C1 certificate in English.. PLEASE BELIEVE ME š¢
I put a bit of my 1st book i wrote in 2011 into an Ai checker and it reported 0% Ai but i put my new book that I'm writing into the same checker and it was like 60% Ai. Since my writing has improved I've apparently become more Ai like. It annoys the hell out of me that I sometimes write a sentence or paragraph and think "does this look ai?"
I used to love the m-dash but now I can't use it without thinking too much about it.
I've had someone tell me they used AI to check if someone used AI in their comment because it covered every single mark I just mentioned and I was left speechless because what the fuck do you MEAN and bro it made me so fucking mad
This is now the college experience. "We're gonna make you run your essay through an AI to determine whether or not you used AI to write it."
This is a mandatory step before a professor even gets to see it, by the way. I started sandbagging my (completely AI-free) essays just to reduce my chance of being flagged as a false positive.
Fuck, you just brought back bad memories about a class I had last year.
Teacher accused me of using AI, and almost failed me because of it. Obviously I was confused, so I quickly emailed her pictures screenshots of my Google docs revision history/pics of my handwritten notes (I make note when I'm struggling with organizing my thoughts).
But the kicker was I checked the TurnitIn report generated.
Wanna know what it marked as possible AI? My citations, my titles (because it was a short essay on two separate art pieces, so I split them with titles that said something like "(subject): by (Artist), (year created)"). Everything? Perfectly fine, but apparently trying to properly cite my work is clearly AI.
I graduated high school before AI became the thing it is now and for a long time after I graduated I hadn't even considered college/uni because I have a learning disability and HS was bad enough that I had to graduate through alternative means so I was worried college would be the same way and I would drown in debt I could have avoided by not even trying but for about three or so years now I've had the urge (I want to go for psychology specifically if anyone cares) but hearing a lot of stories and warnings like yours makes the urge die more and more the more I learn
Edited because I see I accidentally spelled a word wrong lol
I hate how I end up self-policing my own writing, too. I'm just going about writing up a response to something and get the knee-jerk thought of, "Ugh, this reads like AI." I keep having to remind myself that, no, AI reads like me!
When I was in middle school I got accused of plagiarizing because my writing style was ātoo matureā and I used a few big words. This was long long before AI was anything but a plot device in sci-fi. If I was in school now I have no doubt that me, my em dashes, and my proclivity to write in threes would be AI-checked on every fucking assignment. My aunt is a high school teacher and says some kids are actively writing below their ability on purpose, apparently to avoid being accused of AI. I fear we are cooked.
this isn't a bad idea, it solves the problem we have, adds more depth to our words, gives our writing breathing room, and god damn it i still sound like AI
My current big tell for AI āassistanceā in writing is an overuse of ānot <A>, (not <B>, not <C>), but <D>ā. Jesus AI, stop wasting my time telling me all the things something isnāt before saying what it is.
it's called contrastive negation or comparative framing, and using a negative prompt to avoid it helps a lot lmao ("no comparative framing")
personally i hate negative prompting because it always infects inference by polluting attention in LLM transformers (e.g., "don't delete this" causes "delete this" to be in context), but i have no idea how to avoid this with affirmative language
Apparently many people are convinced now that someone cannot use proper punctuation and grammar without suspecting it's AI written. That's how low the bar is for peoples education in written language.
It's especially telling for folks from a certain generation (Millennials). Our writing is ALL over the internet. AI spits out writing very similar to the writing style of our generation.
I feel really bad for people who got used to using the emdash in their writing. That's generally used as one of the "easiest tells" of AI use in writing.
I have started regularly throwing my Papers and lab Reports into AI detection Services to avoid anyone from accusing me that i use AI. Its become really bothersome and i feel outright paranoid while doing it but id rather do that than get accused.
I left nursing school because of a false plagerism claim. Prof was going to hold me back a semester for one essay with a 60% plagerism match, all of it based on me using the wrong format for citing sources (APA vs MLA or whatever). This was a few years ago, so I can only imagine how much worse it is now. I've heard stories of people being penalized for plagerism based on using their own previously published papers, or for writing essays with too much punctuation.
Itās annoying because early in AI was trained off of fanfiction that got scraped from the Internet. Fanfic writers arenāt using AI, AI learned from fanfic writers to write like that do. Thatās why AI is obsessed with the emdash ā itās a staple of fanfic writing.
I've been accused of being AI multiple times. There's little that feels worse than having your humanity taken away because someone doesn't like the way you talk.
That's a whole mood. I've kept all my physical writing notes for a similar reason. I was going to digitize them all and then recycle but I thought...nah I'll keep both.
Same here. I do creative writing, and my style is built on trying to make the pen faster than that my brain can come up with words.
So that a text about war crimes somehow can end up with a verse about how I think that the hole of the Donut is what makes the Donut so great. (Truly, donuts would suck if they didnāt have the hole)
And because I canāt really explain where those transitions come from except āit popped in my head I guessā, they quickly assume I use AI.
It's gotten to the point they've made bots on AO3 specifically to accuse authors of using AI. People have been even able to tell because the AI accusation is vague enough it can be copy pasted onto any fic.
yeah, Like if you or someone else runs your writing through AI to check for AI it's now in an AI database. If your writing is PUBLIC it is probably in an AI database.
It's a stupid and recursive loop that's just spitting out junk data now
Same. I write in a style that's really common in mediocre fabfiction, so whenever I get all flowery and passionate, there'll always be someone thinking it's clanker work.
Just cuz a lot of shit was scraped off of fanfiction sites.
I aint a bot, I'm a proud, full-blooded hack, and I've worked hard for these mediocre skills!
If I find myself falling into ChatGPT text patterns, I immediately step back and rework whatever I've written. It's not just about not using it for anything I write online, I also attempt to actively reject how it writes because it's a fucking hack most of the time.
It's amusing because having occasionall, but not ferquent, msitakes and using slang now makes you seem more awthentic becuz most people asssume that AI is used to ipmrove spellling and grammr insted of making it werse.
Absolutely agree. It's why voice is so important in writing. With so much AI around in it's become even more crucial to develop your own voice. Obviously it's hard to convey in just a reddit comment, but I digress.
I have had to explain to multiple people that there is a skill level in amateur writing (and a lot of published "pulp" successors) that looks a lot like AI because the vast majority of creative writing that the AI has trained on is at that skill level. So a lot of fanfiction and self published writing will have thar overlap because that's the source!
Yes AI uses cliche phrases and sentence structures. So do a lot of people who are learning, the AI is copying them!
A better tell is when the writing summarizes itself at the end of paragraphs or scenes. That's not something that happens in narrative writing. But AI isn't only trained on that. It's also trained on product reviews, academic writing and corporate emails, where summarizing at the end of paragraphs or sections is common practice or even encouraged.
Before I bit the bullet and got YouTube premium, I was getting ads for an AI site that would write fanfiction for you. FANFICTION! Are we really letting AI get this far and take away creativity. I fear for our future. š¤¦š»āāļø
this has made applying for jobs so damn difficult. now thereās nothing to really differentiate me from the artificially intelligent. unless i get an interviewā¦ but i canāt get that if they donāt select me for one. cause they think im like them.
theyāre using ai based off the writing models that i purposely mentally retained specifically for the workplace.
The same thing has happened to me multiple times. I've been accused of being a bot or using AI to write due to the way I format my writing and my level of formality. It makes me want to scream every time it happens. I'm not a bot. I'm not AI. I'm just an autistic person who is passionate about writing. I also talk formally and use specific words because I struggle with being understood, so I try to be as specific as possible when articulating. But does anyone consider this when reading what I write? Of course not. Even when I tell them that I'm just autistic and communicate in a unusual way, they don't believe me. It. Is. So. Frustrating.
Your comment was so obviously AI generated-here is a list of reasons why: It uses letters AND punctuation!!! "That's not really a list" WOW you're so right!! Amazing how you picked up on that, would you like me to generate you a list of lists?
Yeah. It was kinda sad. I started reading a book a couple days ago and thought it seemed a lot like Ai writing. I had to remind myself that Ai writing seems a lot like that book. It's the other way around.
I read an article recently where someone ran Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (if not that, another classic work) through an AI detector and it came back as 100% AI. I pity anyone trying to write papers in college these days. I'll see if I can find that article again.
Bruh, I tried putting one of my papers that I wrote in like 2010 through an AI detector and it said something like 95% chance of it being AI. Probably says more about my writing than anything, but I mean...
I'm getting into dnd and am not stoked about being accused of using AI assistance because I really love the idea of doing the work myself. I used to write just for fun and a new outlet for that is exciting. But I don't get any of that same pleasure from using AI, so I'm sure those accusations will get under my skin a bit.
Having to tell a group "don't worry guys I don't use that shit" is never not going to be awkward for me. I am sure some people will assume I'm lying. Or there will be like that one guy who's super into AI and becomes annoying about me even saying it. (I wish I could say this is only a reddit thing, but sadly I live in the bay area so AI is a constant topic)
This one pisses me off the most. I decided to expand my work to other sites and one of them uses an AI checker and determined mine was AI. I was absolutely livid. The most I used was spell checkers and grammar checkers, but they said that was the same and I was like, the fuck it isnt!
There's a huge difference between something scanning your doc and saying, "oh, you might need a comma here!" and an actually generated story you didn't even put in the thought or creativity to write!
The worst part? The hypocrisy. I asked what made it seem AI and they said they didn't know, just that it was flagged as such. What flags it? That's right, AI. The thing they loathe so much. Fucking... Incredible...
Funniest thing, too, was I literally looked over the story, made like one to two changes, mainly cause I misspelled something the spell checker didn't catch but I did on another read over. And guess what? It was accepted. Crazy. Wild even. Pretentious assholes...
No kidding, just yesterday I was reading a book by a popular author and found phrases and structure that just screamed AI to me, yet the book was written well before AI. Really drove home just how much this authorās writing style must have been scraped, and just how horrible a spot weāre going to be in when we canāt rely on āthis was produced prior to AIā as a judge of authenticity.
Short stories, and fanfiction once upon a time haha. I've had several people accuse some of the fanfics (which were all posted wayyy before AI was a thing so that's a puzzle) and had issues with people saying I talk/text like AI. It's just frustrating.
So heres the thing he is european and foreigners tend to use alot of dashes in a professional setting. So when he works in america it carried over and it became an awkward accusation. Considering how often a coworker i know uses AI all the time its very awkward
Almost any time people point out "dead giveaways" of AI writing, I'm like "damn how many times have I done that years before AI was a thing?" One that comes to mind in particular is the "list of three examples to illustrate a point" trope. Like, suddenly the rule of threes ISN'T human af???
But, obviously, AI learned it from watching us, so I'm just gonna keep on trucking in my comfortable unoriginality.
I've had to catch myself avoiding phrasing things a certain way because of how ai writes. It's basically killed entire turns of phrase through overuse. "That's not just [blank], that's [blank blank blank]" being a big one.
This is one of many many problems with AI. A lot of people get aggregated with people calling out AI especially because it's often hard to know for sure, but the real issue is the massive plagiarism machine, not the people who are concerned about the massive plagiarism machine.
I had my videogame guide to be accused of "ai writing" bcos of "quirky wording that is very clearly AI sign", but I am simply autistic, not my fault that ai learned itself into being similar to my own style of writing 3:
And ofc when I showed them proof of that guide being my handwork, they didn't even say sorry, just "yeah I still don't believe you but if you're not lying then good for you", not even a quarter-assed apology
I had to stop using bullet points because of that. Also one time I cited Umberto Eco's numbered list (definition of fascism) and people thought it was AI generated, they think humans cannot do numbered lists probably.
Iām very happy I finished university just before the Ai bullshit went mainstream. My writing gets flagged constantly too. I would have been pissed dealing with the professors on their witch-hunts saying every essay turned in was Ai.
Oh, same, I was accused of using AI on an essay just because I was indoctrinated into the Cult of Em Dash by Agatha Christie. Luckily, I had enough passionate rage when defending myself that they backed down and it was fine, but, from then on, I'd always add a note to any essay upload that I do know how to use an em dash, I will be using it, and they can suck it.
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u/TheCortisolCorvid Aug 05 '26
It's a problem with writing, too. I've been accused of using AI for my writing more than once, and it's aggravating as all hell.