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67% Positive

Analyzed from 1888 words in the discussion.

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#don#care#writing#art#prove#used#human#slop#prose#dashes

Discussion (25 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

Keeeeeeeks•about 1 hour ago
I think the only way to really prove you wrote something is a camera streaming video and audio from a faraday caged room, and a program like this recording each keystroke

Then you can upload that to a private repo after each session.

Otherwise people make a program an agent can use to type and retype whole sections like a person

hyperhello•about 1 hour ago
That would be a major red flag to me — a pointless, highly compressible stream of images that prove nothing in actuality but are easy to define.

If your work is being confused with AI, think about why. I never confused Trevanian and Martin Amis and Roald Dahl with AI.

stets•about 1 hour ago
> As I’ve mentioned before, we now live in a world where creative people have to prove they created the thing they created.

Do you? Just stop caring. I don't think it makes sense to keep asserting that you're an AI vegan in order to please randos. You'll always get hate creating/building anything online. The people that enjoy your work won't care if it's AI or not or they'll believe you.

overgard•about 1 hour ago
It's not just other creatives that care, it's consumers. There's a lot of backlash on steam against games that contain AI content. Personally, while I think GenAI has a place, I think this backlash is good. People have gotten way out ahead of their ski's and have gone way too hard on quantity instead of quality. If you use ChatGPT to do research for your book? Great. I bet it's better for it. Did you use ChatGPT to write your book? I have zero interest in reading it. It's a strong signal that no work was put into writing it so I should invest no work in reading it.
skydhash•about 1 hour ago
I don’t really care if someone use AI, I care if the result is slop. And it very much seems like it’s very rare for those who use AI to care about the result and avoid producing slop.

If it was bad, the hand produced result will also be criticized, but AI tools distort all the signals that let you avoid slop beforehand. No you need to invest time to recognize the slop and that time will not be given back to you.

happytoexplain•about 1 hour ago
Even disregarding the bizarre assertion that a human author could "just stop caring" at will, this is still unrealistic even on a practical level. Enough consumers want to know whether prose is AI that it matters.
beej71•about 1 hour ago
I have yet to be so-accused, but if I ever am, I'm just going to accuse the accuser of being an AI. :)
scarmig•about 1 hour ago
Sounds like something an AI would say.
beej71•about 1 hour ago
You're not wrong, and you're right to push back on that. The speech pattern is real.
TimPC•about 1 hour ago
A lot of writing publications are so overwhelmed by submissions that they run an AI tool on everything and don't even read the ones that fail (for whatever threshold they think is best). Plus look at the recent backlash against the book where the author according to detectors used about three quarters AI gen. If you do your art for anyone but yourself you care a great deal about your work showing as human and being treated as having soul rather than testing as machine and being treated as witch hunt grade slop.
Analemma_•about 1 hour ago
The publishing market has been brutal for many years now: even before AI, there have been multiple stories of angry backlash for any number of reasons causing a book to get yanked before it is even officially released.

With such a small number of people actually buying new books now, the cohort of angry, vindictive Twitter/Goodreads loudmouths has a lot of power and publishers are terrified of them. "Not caring" about them isn't an option, from a business perspective.

josefritzishere•about 1 hour ago
We must prove ownership and creation to collect revenue in many situations. Its even more problematic that AI gets used to steal content, or directly impersonate creators. AI devalues everything.
legacynl•about 1 hour ago
My spidey sense is tingling with this post. If someone was really scared that their text would be assumed to be AI, why wouldnt you at least stop using the obvious AI-sign, i.e. the long dashes? Does the meaning of the text really change that much that you MUST use — instead of - ?

Also: * No dashes before the 'its not vibe coding post' (or very rare), afterwards lots of dashes. * All pixel art images are AI generated.

JoshTriplett•about 1 hour ago
> why wouldnt you at least stop using the obvious AI-sign, i.e. the long dashes

Em-dashes have a long literary history, which is where AI got them from, and they're genuinely useful in writing. We shouldn't let LLMs ruin that for us in literature. The fact that they've historically been less common in online writing is in part because of deficiencies in input systems, though they're easy enough to type with a compose key or similar, or a typesetting system that interprets `---` as `—`.

jonesy827•about 1 hour ago
vunderba•about 1 hour ago
I agree but it feels like a bit of a losing battle at this point, and I can't help but be reminded of the history of the Sanskrit swastika.
vunderba•about 1 hour ago
Yeah, the images [1] used here are clearly the result of someone prompting a generative AI model to make "pixel art". You can tell because they suffer from the same issues all AI-generated pixel art has: no consistent square-pixel grid alignment, fuzzy edges, etc.

No shade but it feels slightly Michael Scott-level of self-awareness on a post all about securing one's artistic integrity.

[1] - https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/191463/2026/courtroom-scene-n...

saaaaaam•about 1 hour ago
It wasn’t the em-dashed that sent my spirit sense tingling. It was all the obvious AI tics and tropes. But maybe it’s satirical.
_dwt•about 1 hour ago
I wondered the same but after running some previous entries through Pangram (and giving them the ol' Mark I Eyeball), I don't think this is satirical. How annoyingly ironic.
3dedb728-3f77•about 1 hour ago
If the prose is not the same as LLM, then all is good.

It is not that it is bad prose, it is that we read it everywhere.

We got LLM prose fatigue.

TimPC•about 1 hour ago
LLMs still write middling quality prose. Aspects of it are good but they write in a very tropey manufactured style that isn't something we are fatigued of, it's something that's inherently flawed and disliked.
matteoraso•about 1 hour ago
I don't see what this offers that Git doesn't. Even if Git only tracks lines, that's still a good proxy of how many words you wrote. Besides, you can use git diff to see whether an individual character was changed, even if the number of lines stayed the same.
stenmorten•about 1 hour ago
I recognize myself in that I build instead of publish.

This is just fear of rejection, in productivity-clothing.

The only way to publish, or to get published, is to put yourself out there.

You risk rejection and ridicule. But life is not a spectator sport.

nitwit005•about 1 hour ago
Unfortunately, people will truly try to fake the "paper trail". People posted sped up video of them creating art as proof they made it, so people also used AI to try to generate that.
dandersch•about 1 hour ago
Do you have examples?

I don't think AI can create convincing timelapses of digital art being made, yet. I know there is nothing stopping it from getting there, but I think artists are happy for any kind of proof-of-work they can produce right now.

nitwit005•3 minutes ago
The most casual Google searches show results: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DOvcEN1kXp0/

Including a research paper from a few years back: https://inversepainting.github.io/

georgeecollins•about 1 hour ago
Entrepreneurs of hacker news: Media companies are experimenting with tools that try to detect if a work contains AI. I don't have the domain knowledge to know if that will work, but it seems like the alternative is to have a system to track the provenance of a piece of art or a written work. If you could say that every change was done by party/ person xy then a company buying or licensing it could comfortably depend xy's assurance that it was original work.
epiccoleman•about 1 hour ago
The problem with this idea is that it operates on the assumption that consumers will actually care about "provenance" on art.

I just don't really buy that the set of people who care about that will be big enough for artists to care about signing up for some kind of provenance-tracking regime. Obviously there will be some people in that category on both sides, but I think it'll be niche. I have a hard time imagining Taylor Swift or Drake or whoever is going to start blockchaining their songwriting so that no one can say they used AI. It won't be a big enough segment of their market to care.

(and in fact, the first time Taylor Swift does some big AI-generated video or whatever, all of a sudden a whole bunch of people will suddenly decide they're cool with it)

TimPC•about 1 hour ago
There seems to be a huge backlash to existing works where AI was detected already at least in my art (creative writing). So I think we already have evidence consumers care. I don't think blockchaining is the solution for the general public, but I'd probably do exactly that if I was taking a university course these days since they tend to be hyper sensitive about AI and err on the side of the accuser so I want strong evidence my writing is mine. Which of course is ridiculously insufferable because I used to do a good portion of my homework in paper notebooks on the subway without stable internet.
retrac•about 1 hour ago
Generative AI could synthesize a plausible commit history, too.
nh23423fefe•about 1 hour ago
Constructing validation claims for useless properties, doesn't render the object with the property valuable?
nonameiguess•about 1 hour ago
This is fundamentally impossible without multiple third parties personally witnessing the act of creation. Consider John Milton was blind and composed Paradise Lost by dictating it to another person. Even if you can prove a human, even a specific human, physically performed the act of typing or writing, that doesn't prove they came up with the words themselves. LLMs can whisper in your ear.

Though I don't personally believe this, consider the most widely-read book in the history of western civilization still has contested authorship, with many if not most readers convinced God himself dictated the words to the humans who wrote it down. We have no way to prove or disprove that.

_dwt•about 1 hour ago
I'm a little confused in that this post is either (partially?) AI-generated or deliberately written to appear so (including to Pangram).

I'm a self-confessed AI hater and yet I agree with the "just write your thing" people on this one. I've watched this play out on Substack and I think there's a mix of a) people genuinely scared of what I believe to be very rare false positives from automatic detection, b) people who use AI (but claim otherwise) trying to use group (a) as cover to argue against automatic detection, and c) the hoi polloi throwing rotting fruit at anyone who uses an em dash.

You can safely ignore group (c); they aren't going to be your people even with a fully-attested human changelog witnessed by the Pope and encoded on the blockchain. Group (b) are basically grifters and also to be ignored. Group (a)'s concerns are valid but in the large I don't see a lot of "grey area" writing online; I see a lot of obvious slop. (Possibly the well-done AI assistance goes unnoticed by me, in which case - philosophical concerns aside - I can only think of the old XKCD comic about spam bots - mission accomplished? I don't think so, though.)

Back to the OP, I didn't really understand the "meet the enemy" section - did that experiment go anywhere? My results from trying to see if even frontier models can capture voice, style, philosophy from my own technical writing corpus have been terrible to laughable at best.

babu_mick•about 1 hour ago
super cool
WCSTombs•about 2 hours ago
> That map makes it stupidly easy to tell a human from a machine. Someone who commits 50,000 lines in an afternoon did not type those by hand. Someone doing a couple hundred? Probably real. Simple.

Uh, this isn't true, though? I squash commits all the time locally before I publish them. There can be many reasons for that, but at the end of the day, I'm not obligated to share my messy revision history with the world. In the most extreme case, the first commit on one of my projects spans multiple years of development because it was forked from another project that's now pretty irrelevant to it. On the other hand, I've received pull requests that were a couple dozen lines and were definitely LLM-authored.

As sort of a counterpoint to the author's goals, IMO the community should extend the benefit of the doubt to writers and artists who explicitly say they don't use AI, because it's just really hard to prove that you're not using AI. Trying to force any kind of system will inevitably affect the quality of what you make, and the art community should not want that.

bradyd•about 1 hour ago
It's also possible to break the 50,000 lines up into multiple commits and fake the commit dates, so this does nothing to prove a human wrote them.
Krutonium•about 1 hour ago
Yea there's literally software that lets you put art into your commit history blog graph on github by making a repo with potentially tens of thousands of dummy commits.
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eth0up•about 2 hours ago
Please forgive me. I am NOT asserting anything, but I read this (your website), and had it not contained express claims of not being AI, I would have bet a substantial stake that it was AI. Perhaps because AI imitates good writing styles, I am not sure, but it matches many of the signals that for me, indicate AI

Edit: The above said, I am seeing in my own writing, artifacts from my interactions with AI. I am proof that, in some cases, AI can be contagious.

arjie•about 1 hour ago
Haha, I have to agree. Their style is either intentionally similar for humorous reasons or they're the kind of writer who was copied.

> The words are the crime scene, not the alibi.

If the latter, it must suck haha. It reminds me of the fact that I used to wear masks when I had a cold so that I could do things with my friends like help them move or whatever without risking them getting sick. But then one day, a pandemic arrived, and wearing a mask was a political decision. Now if I do, I'm making a political statement unintentionally! Tragic, but it can't be helped.

Regardless, I see why they feel the need to make this service. Their post gets hard-flagged by Pangram haha.

pmg101•about 1 hour ago
I agree.

My guess is the author either

1. Deliberately used LLM tics in their prose, for artistic and provocative reasons, or 2. Used AI

It's quite interesting to reflect on.

nh23423fefe•about 1 hour ago
anti-ai people harass each other, and gain nothing because their world model is bad.
bigyabai•about 1 hour ago
If the AI people had a better world model, then we'd probably know by now.

Kinda seems like both "sides" are losing.