Notes from Roderich's Desk

writing “long” paragraphs is not a sign of AI — it’s a common narrative choice many writers make both in fanfiction and in traditionally published novels, and AI stole it from us.

using an em dash is not a sign of AI. it’s a stylistic sentence choice that’s been an option in place of commas and semicolons for a very long time, and AI stole it from us.

long sentence structures are not a sign of AI, but are yet another stylistic choice writers often make to create a cadence and tone that mimics the flow of poetry, and AI stole it from us.

“YA narrative breaks”? i don’t even know what the fuck this means, but i can guarantee that AI stole it from us.

italics are once again a stylistic choice that many writers love to use to create emphasis, and it’s a more stylistically acceptable and traditional form of emphasis than bold or underline text. oh, and just to be extra clear: AI STOLE IT FROM US.

stop creating fandom witch hunts over AI when you know fuck all about what it means to sit and write a story, and to spend hours fiddling with sentence structure and dialogue to get the exact right tone. writers will stop writing out of fear that their work “sounds like AI” — IT DOESNT! AI STOLE FROM US! AI SOUNDS LIKE US! — and after a while, all that will be available on AO3 is shitty AI-generated fanfiction.

because yeah, people are going to continue to use AI to write fanfiction whether you “call them out” or not. but making a laughable thread on X that uses asinine criteria is not going to fix that problem. it will just push the real writers out because people will accuse them of using AI when they haven’t, and they will (rightfully) stop writing for spaces that attack them.

this is a long post, buckle up.

Okay, if you haven't heard anything about NaNoWriMo's statement about the use of AI in writing, I am both jealous of you and here to ruin that for you.

The folks over at National Novel Writing Month have released a statement (which you can read here) that explicitly says that being Anti-genAI is classist and ableist. My gut reaction is that this is a fucking asinine take -- poor and disabled people have been writing for longer than we've even had the electricity that powers AI -- but the more I think about it, the angrier I get about the anti-community sentiment that they seem to be pushing.

The claims that are made in this statement are either non-issues or something that AI does not actually fix. Yeah, not everyone can afford to hire an editor, but that is a large part of why writing communities exist both in-person and online. Exchange works with a friend and help each other out, find a discord server and ask there. Make use of a writing community. The same thing applies to ableism; Yeah, we all have different abilities and not everyone can "see" what might need improvement. So you share your work with another writer and get feedback from your community. Writing is a skill that needs to be honed and in order to do that, you have to be okay with being bad at it sometimes.

I'm not even sure I can say much about their "General access" paragraph because, like... AI is not going to fix the systemic issues with the publishing industry. It just won't. That entire paragraph gets half-way to a point and then falls on its ass into the void.

As if I wasn't angry enough, NaNoWriMo edited the statement about 8 hours ago to say "Note: we have edited this post by adding this paragraph to reflect our acknowledgment that there are bad actors in the AI space who are doing harm to writers and who are acting unethically."

This makes me want to throw my computer out a fucking window. Using AI in writing or any other art is inherently unethical because the language models being used are trained on works by people who did not consent to their work being used to train said AI. It is theft. It is plagiarism. Plain and simple. Chat-GPT was trained using the entirety of the New York Times archive, so when you use Chat-GPT, what it produces is based off of the work of NYT journalists (read about the resulting lawsuit here). It's not that there are "bad actors", the programs themselves are built on stealing writing. We've known this for what feels like ages now. This is such a bullshit edit and a fucking sad attempt at saving their asses.

make sure to delete your nanowrimo accounts

(context: nanowrimo's statement on use of ai and calling the argument against ai "classist and ableist")

(additional context: nanowrimo is being sponsored by a ai company this year)

good day:

make coffee

regular day:

put water in coffee maker

put coffee in coffee maker

turn on coffee maker

bad day:

take pot from coffee maker

turn on sink

fill up coffee pot

turn off sink

pour water into coffee maker

put coffee pot in coffee maker

open cupboard

get coffee filter from cupboard

get coffee beans from cupboard

put filter in coffee pot

measure coffee

pour coffee into filter

close coffee maker

turn coffee maker on

*this can mean tuition fees** and/or general living costs while enrolled full time in courses

I saw a lot in online trans groups where people would get blood test results back from a doctor (who didn’t go through and explain to them what was going on well enough) and they would be confused about reading the results because of how they are coded in patient portals sometimes

So like if you’re on testosterone HRT for example they are likely to give standardized “normal ranges” for various things that are the “female normal ranges” and then put a little automated alert on them when they’re outside of that range. So you might not be prepared to interpret everything correctly on the summary page if you don’t know the specifics of this. Like you look and you’re like aaaa it says my ___ levels are off, but they actually aren’t.

And that’s not just hormone levels, it can also do that with your hematocrit etc. Once I asked my endocrinologist whether my red blood cells were starting to get too high because they were showing up as slightly elevated (and that’s a not uncommon effect) and he was like no, that’s still actually in the totally normal male range where the upper end is a few percentage points higher, it’s just not obvious that those ranges are different in the way they present the information on the portal. Because they don’t give both for comparison, they tend to hide the ranges that are deemed not applicable based on how you are in the database for insurance coding. It’s annoying!

Party has infiltrated a winery that is distributing poisoned wine throughout the land. They come across a cultist on their own and begin interrogating them.

Tiefling Hecate Warlock: So you admit you’ve been selling tainted wine that makes people go crazy?

Dionysus Cultist NPC: Why, yes. We spread wine and madness in the worship of our god. How do you worship your gods?

tired of this crap: Like this!

*one-shots the cultist*

03.06.2024 [😚]