I’m blindsided by authors using ai in their works. how can readers and writers tell if the writing is ai generated?
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.
I’ve already talked more about this here, here, here. and more on my other blog @writingdose here and here.
You can notice certain telltale signs in some of the writing, such as short sentence stacking and usage of "not x not y but z" structures. But you have to be familiar with AI writing styles to be able to notice that.
I’ve been writing “not x, not y, but z” way before gen ai became a thing. I’ve read works that have “not x, not y, but z” in them, and I’ve read those works way before gen ai became a thing. I’ve also been using em dash way before gen ai became a thing, and I’ve seen em dash used in so many written works way before gen ai became a thing. I know for a fact some human writers actually prefer short sentence stacking too.
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.
when I say ai witch hunt, speculations and accusations harm the writing community as much as ai does, if not more, “not x, not y, but z” and em dash are one of the main things I’m talking about.
As I saw someone say recently, when you start declaring "obvious tells," from punctuation to sentence styles, to be proof of AI, what you're actually spotting is trace amounts of the original source material.
