Inkpot-Crackpot

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.

#STORY TIME. SIXTH GRADE

#my math teacher chewed me out in front of the whole class for not turning in an assignment EVEN THOUGH DID

#so she handed me a paper and thought I could do it in class and then turn it in fora late grade

#she called me out telling me was being defiant and threatened to call my grandmother

#time skip. she's handing back graded papers. at this point had completed the missing assignment

#AND WHAT'S THIS? SHE HANDS BACK TWO OF THE SAME PAPERS. BOTH WITH TWO DIFFERENT DATES

#ONE BEFORE THE DUE DATE. AND ONE AFTER #SO HAD COMPLETED THE PAPER. IT WASN'T A MISSING ASSIGNMENT

#ANDI GOT NO APOLOGY FOR IT

#still hold a grudge to this day. I'm sorry Im not letting that slide #reblog

#another story is with one of my elementary teachers #in language arts

#after reading an article/ story we were expected to have the page filled with notes #well we did so. but it wasnt enough

#instead of. y'know. encouraging us to analyze a little more we were constantly shamed for not doing enough

#like whole class time telling us how mad she was LIKE. TELL US HOW TO IMPROVE

I have lost a few paper assignments. But I always assumed it was my fault for being disorganized, not the student's fault for not turning it in. Like, yeah, I asked them to check everything and be sure but... I really cannot care about the piece of paper with answers written on it.

Unfortunately, The System needs a grade. And teaching can be very stressful. But what the fuck, why didn't they apologize?

I had an incredible opportunity in high school. I got to go on a scientific expedition in the middle of the fall semester—like something straight out of the fucking wild thornberries. I was so excited.

I was also adhd. Unmedicated. I did well in class but had a tough time with homework. So when I had to get her to sign a permission form to join some leading scientists in the field for two weeks—she REFUSED.

I dropped her class and went anyway. The scientists I met helped me to get into undergrad—failing grades and two letters of recommendation from NASA got me accepted on academic probation. Long story short, I turned in my PhD thesis at one of the best universities in the world today.

When I dropped my AP Psych class, the teacher spent the entire class (which I still had to sit through) ranting about how teenagers had undeveloped brains and we made poor decisions. She spent half the lecture glaring at me.

So I approached them about it and they doubled down. They claimed it was fine, privated all the videos (as they ought to have done from the start), and tried to carry on with it. And then for two months if I googled my name the first result was a dead link to their YouTube page featuring a thumbnail image of a screaming child with a swastika on their forehead.

I’m gonna assume writers know whether or not their own works are ai because they either write them themselves or have ai write for them.

but as for readers (or writers who read other writers’ works), no, you can’t tell unless the writer themself says their works are ai generated. anything else is witch hunt, speculations and possibly wrongful accusations — all of which harm the writing community as much as ai does, if not more.

so if at any point you think an untagged work is ai and if that bothers you, quietly click away. but you can never know for sure based on vibes. because everything ai writes, a human writer does. that’s what ai was trained on and what it was trained to mimic.

every “ai telltale” is something humans write before, otherwise ai wouldn’t have been able to mimic it in the first place. because it needs human-made works to mimic on.

AI cannot pass for good writing at any length; you may not know what's wrong with it but you can see it's short on meaning and completely uniform in tone and emphasis. But it can pass for amateur writing, and amateurs need to be encouraged and not accused.

So that's why, even though I am pretty good at detecting AI, I don't throw out accusations. Because maybe they're just starting out and they haven't yet learned their individual voice, how to pack writing with meaning, how to vary the tone and emphasize the important parts.

sort their Ao3 queries by popularity and only read stuff that enough other people have approved of,

click away from bad stuff too fast to really appreciate how bad it is and how much worse it could have gotten,

have in the past few years mentally shifted to attributing ALL bad fic writing to AI, thus creating a feedback loop for themselves where bad=AI always, with no chance to correct this perspective, or

have benefited from Ao3's, let's say, reputation as a site for "good writing only," (not true, but many believe this) which has resulted in many beginner, young, self-aware, or self-critical writers sequestering themselves to wattpad or other platforms. this is purely anecdotal, but despite still only ever sorting by date, i believe i'm encountering far less "bad" writing in any given fandom than i used to back on fanfiction.net, which didn't have the potentially intimidating reputation for "high quality" writing that Ao3 enjoys. this might give someone who hasn't been in fandom for literal decades the impression that most fic is average at worst, so that when they do see the "outlier" bad fics, they feel there must be some explanation for why those exist. "since they don't fit in with the rest, must be AI"

meanwhile, the fics they're reading:

anyway, bad writing is good and should be left alone.

it might be bad for you, but it may be plenty fine for the author's friends and they're having fun together so don't be sour and go read something else

it might be bad for you, but it's actually doing a bit, and you didn't understand, aren't privy to the joke, or are too young/old to "get it"

it might be bad for you, but the author is fighting for their LIFE trying to write in a language that isn't their native one, and they know. they KNOW it's not the best thing you've read. just shut up and let them express themselves, learn a language, and have fun

it might be bad for you, but the author is 14 and has literally never written fiction before in their life outside of a prompted school assignment short story. they may or may not be aware of the "quality" of their writing. doesn't matter. leave them alone. i can't even imagine the damage being accused of sounding like AI would do to someone at that stage, before getting even half a chance to develop their own voice, perspective, style. you could leave them questioning whether they have anything worth saying or are capable of doing anything uniquely so bad they'll never write fiction again til the very day they die.

it might be bad for you, but it belongs on Ao3. full stop

it might be bad for you, but Ao3 isn't a writing pageant or a "good fiction" vending machine; it's an archive. think of it specifically as a historical archive if you have trouble with the idea

it might be bad for you, but this person hasn't tried writing anything since graduating high school five decades ago and a) needs practice just as much as the hypothetical 14yo above bc skills can't just be plucked off a tree on a whim b) this person is doing something for fun in their limited time and they can either get the chance to grow into a unique voice in the community or you can chase them off with your prickly standards c) doesn't "get" all your ideas of "good" writing that may actually just be a collection of fads, tropes, and styles that enjoy popularity at the moment, and they are actually just doing things their own way that might be way more interesting and good than your narrow taste can recognize

it might be bad for you, but it's actually good for you. seeing your own mistakes in someone else's writing, where those same mistakes are finally revealed to you by being laid bare without the fig leaf of a brain working hard to supplement what you wrote with what you had intended to write, is a great way to grow as a writer. seeing something that makes you cringe and swearing to never do that yourself is a great way to find your voice and style. read some bad fic once in a while; enjoy it; learn something

bad writing is a good and natural byproduct of humans writing. many different kinds of people (with different levels of language proficiency, different experiences, different tastes) sitting down and writing results in a huge variety of content, aesthetics, and quality. such high natural variability means no one here is a big enough expert to reliably sort the failure of inexperienced humans (to form something ~like what they have read before) from the failure of AI (to form something ~like what it has been fed and given value data for).

the cost of accusing bad writers of using ai is too high for the questionable benefit of playing whack-a-mole with "potentially" ai fics

it would be really nice if we could somehow reliably separate "generated by ai" (boo) from "cooked up by a gremlin" (yay) but, for reasons previous replies have detailed, we can't so leave it be.

When I asked my friend about it, they said they hadn't gotten around to reading it yet. I pointed out that it was very likely AI and looked very sloppy, they just shrugged and said "that's possible."