Machines that help the outsourcing of mental effort are a wonder, and have many positive uses, but they're also dangerous. Join me in a discussion with other Substack voices tonight
I’ve had the experience of being accused of pasting AI content even though it was all my own. I am an old-timer who believes in correct spelling, punctuation, and proofreading, as well as some attention to composition and diction.
Consider how strange it is that we have to wonder whether or not we're communicating with an AI. That should NOT have happened, but it did because we shoot first then ask questions later... or ask Christian Slater, lol.
We seem to be okay running forward at full speed with our eyes closed - that is until we hit the wall and the bodies begin to pile up. Why do we do it that way?
Yes! The next geological epoch shouldn't be anthropocene, it should be goofypocene!
EDIT: An good emblem for the goofypocene would be a Mount Rushmore with Trump's face between Grave Digger monster truck, and the Kool-Aid Man! Ohhh Yeahhhhh!
X just ID'd me as a potential bot and I have no idea why... they say they put a label on my posts. Of which there are like 5 or 6 a day and on normal stuff.
I'm so sick of reading ai generated articles. Same tone. Same style overall. I can't read more than a couple paragraphs and unsubscribed from more than one content maker who used to be good as a result. I'd rather have fewer authentically written pieces than lots of drivel.
And the excess words! AI’s awful, but it’s only a direct descendent of Madison Avenue, corporate mediocrity and MBAs always trying to monetize something out of nothing. So doesn’t seem new to me.
Even worse are the Youtube videos. They're over half my "Premium" feed lately. After a few seconds of listening to the slightly-off voiceover and watching a series of random, often inappropriate stock photos and video footage, I get suspicious and scroll down to the disclosures and there it is: "How this was made; Made with AI; Sounds or visuals were altered or fully generated."
I'm actually not that good at detecting what content was actually created ("fully generated") by AI and what was only assisted ("altered"). In other words, I may have already fallen for some of the establishment media's brainwashing tactics. Yikes!
You think you're not good, Danno? AI would smack me back and forth like a tennis ball and I would probably never know. I have little doubt that I've already unknowingly argued with an AI. It's like arguing with an 8 ball or a Ouija board.
Freddie DeBoer has a good article about this. He found the program to be inaccurate. A 300 word excerpt from one of his posts was judged to be AI written but when the whole post was put in it was judged to be 100% human written. He got other inconsistent results with it. I would be highly skeptical of it.
Couldn't this be used as another means of control? Any article or comment that says something they don't like, is flagged as AI content? Someone is setting up the algorithm to find something - so what if it's flagging dissent and unacceptable thoughts rather than AI writing style?
There are one or two Substack authors that I would look forward to running through this analysis >cough< Malone >cough<, based largely on a sudden avalanche of output.
However, I really hope this analyzing machine isn't heavily weighted against em dashes. We em dash aficionados are feeling unfairly persecuted. 😜
I don't know Malone, but I've seen enough statistics from multiple politically diverse sources, to confidently state that it's down to the flip of a coin as to whether you're reading/seeing/hearing a human or an AI.
EDIT I had to come back and fix "IA" to "AI". That should prove I'm not an IA, I mean AI, lol
Tardigrade, why don't you run this Ai detector through Malone's posts before telling us you suspect his posts are Ai? Also maybe have Ai check that cough of yours, it might be cough >Tourettes< cough
FWIW, I tried out the underlying tool and found it very inaccurate. A 3000 word test article I fed into it came back with the claim of 100% AI-written. I suspect there will be a bit of a witch hunt coming.
Lawyers, accountants and doctors are also trying to get keep their intellectual advantage so it's only natural for the word Smith's to attempt to gatekeep along with the intellectually elite academic class. Unfortunately time is not on your side. It is the formation of the human mind that is at risk and that is what should be protected. Not the tools that one employs but rather how one's thoughts are formulated. These are different conversations.
Outsourcing individual preference? And discretion to a third party is never useful. The argument is that you're going to use an AI to tell you whether or not the thing you're reading is from an AI. You're going to outsource your own discretion to the machine you're afraid of. And for the authors who's livelihood depends upon revenues from their subscribers, subscribers who might be turned off by a false positive this could be devastating. On the one hand, it's censorship and gatekeeping and on the other hand, you're just outsourcing more of your intellect to a machine... This subject is exactly the ontology and teleology of my substack and this is why I will never charge for any word posted.
I think it may be an issue of people who are a bit too cock-sure of themselves. It can come across a bit condescending, and I am not pointing a finger at Gargoyle, because I'm pretty sure that I come across like that much too often. It's about tone, which I find difficult. Gargoyle's substance is sound and the point is made. However, Writing 101 - a writer has to consider the audience.
... One of the problems with dictating into a phone is that you get odd punctuation and capitalization. Driving along making a casual comment I hesitated and it inserted a? after the first statement which made it seem condescending... Then it capitalized the next word and created an odd sentence... I get how people will read that and while I will always take great pains to make sure the things I post on my channel are are exactly what I want to say, I don't feel that same need when making comments in an open forum. Seems most people these days on line take themselves far too seriously and when not online take themselves far less seriously than they should. I didn't really scrutinize the post until you made the comment of cocksure which implies condescension and I can see it now.. change the punctuation and it should read like more of a general comment on outsourcing your mind to a machine.
No one should be surprised to see authors flailing in moral panic about artificial writing while simultaneously allowing AI to do all their research and create their graphics... The human side of the gargoyle already lived through such a transition over the last two decades in his professional life and he too was resentful that hard one skills were being replaced by trained monkeys pushing on a keyboard, but such is the nature of technology and creativity is not in the technique alone, but in the mind and AI does not have one... Either adapt or learned to weld...
It would appear from your two comments here that you might benefit from either an editor or an AI proofreader. Grammar, spelling, comprehension, and sentence/paragrah structure do not appear to be your strong suits.
There have been so many scifi movies made of a dystopian future where humans are just heads on a table or brains in a jar. AI is the opposite - a dystopian future where humans are just ambulatory bodies without any brains.
There's an old Star Trek episode where the Enterprise comes upon a malfunctioning spaceship drifting in space, and it turns out that the ship has done EVERYTHING for the inhabitants for many generations while travelling in space, and because no one on the ship has had to think for generations, they became complete idiots oblivious to what was around them and incapable of fixing even the simplest problem.
Sometimes an article that sounds like it was written by AI (because it sounds like a speech by Barack Obama on a bad day) is actually written by a real person. Probably one who learned to write by watching bad Barack Obama speeches.
BO actually did have a bad day on camera, remember? He was campaigning for KamLama and he actually tried to be black with a group of black guys. Ouch! He looked weak, ineffectual, and very much like a clueless white guy trying too hard to be a homey.
No, I'm not an Illini, which looks like rhymes with weenie, but actually rhymes with mai tai. However, he was a two term US President. As far as his political origins, I only know he rose very quickly to become a presidential candidate.
Other than that, I believe him to be a major player in the current horrid state of the country, and I also believe he deserves to do some time behind bars. Or maybe just paraded naked through the streets while citizens throw rotten things at him.
I saw reporting that he was interviewed lately, and dropped the “R” word. Not, “reparations,” but “Reconstruction,” while attacking the Veep. Can’t wait for the No Reconstruction protests, led by my local chapter of Indivisible. Just, wow.
Higher Ed uses Pangram. I did a little exercise where I asked Claude to generate a 1000 word essay on a topic. Pangram correctly identified it as 100% AI generated. I then put the Claude output into Stealth GPTs humanizer and pasted that output into Pangram. The result - Pangram identified my Claude created, StealthGPT edited essay as 100% human authored. For every AI detection tool, someone is working on an AI detection avoidance tool while we subsidize the data centers needed for the dance.
Sure sounds a lot like the designer drug market - as soon as law enforcement discovers the new formula, the formulators just change the formula and keep the train a runnin!
I think we just have to go through this madness and get to rock bottom. People must be able to plainly see that there can be too much technology. There IS too much tech! I'm a retired tech pro, and I've been saying this since the early 2000's, and it's much worse today.
I believe tech addiction is on a similar path as crack cocaine.
Crack completely devastated low-income communities before those communities finally woke up. The younger generations saw abuse and were abused by crack-addicted adults, so they were repelled.
I think it has to get so bad, that the young ones coming up are so horrified by what they see, they reject it entirely. I guess we'll just have to wait for that to happen.
This looks great at first, but, as @Gargoyle Protocol noted, we won't do well relying on AI only, even to detect AI's presence. I assume the principle is similar to setting a third to catch a thief, but what if, as sometimes happens with thieves, the AI suddenly decides to cover for its cousin?
In any case, it isn't likely to be greatly useful to me - I am convinced the few Substacks I subscribe to are human-written, and the new tool will only work on Substack. Further, given what journalism schools are producing these days, I think it likely AI would do a better job than many. The deterioration of the quality of writing in journalism over the past 5 decades or so has made me shudder more than once. When I was little, my parents let me read The New York Times, and it exposed me to quite decent writing. Now, I would hide it until the child in question has sufficient grounding in good writing to discern its lack in those pages.
Must be some sort of correlation, if not causation, between that poor writing you mention and the now widespread belief that socialism has something to offer besides totalitarianism.
Lack of brain power and training, I believe, does for both. My parents were insistent I learn to think independently, though schools weren't so much, at least until college - and college wouldn't do that now.
Matt, I would rather infrequent actual words from you than frequent AI slop, even if curated to be as good as possible. You have my subscription $ because you tell the truth sporadically in a sea of BS. Keep doing what you are doing!
Anyone know if I can run this on my own comments? I would like to see how I stack up. I don't know if it would be a compliment or an insult to rank highly on the AI meter.
I’ve had the experience of being accused of pasting AI content even though it was all my own. I am an old-timer who believes in correct spelling, punctuation, and proofreading, as well as some attention to composition and diction.
That's what I'm worried about.
What recourse do you have?
How do you prove that you actually wrote something?
This is very strange territory we're entering here.
Consider how strange it is that we have to wonder whether or not we're communicating with an AI. That should NOT have happened, but it did because we shoot first then ask questions later... or ask Christian Slater, lol.
We seem to be okay running forward at full speed with our eyes closed - that is until we hit the wall and the bodies begin to pile up. Why do we do it that way?
Because we’re goofy humans.
Yes! The next geological epoch shouldn't be anthropocene, it should be goofypocene!
EDIT: An good emblem for the goofypocene would be a Mount Rushmore with Trump's face between Grave Digger monster truck, and the Kool-Aid Man! Ohhh Yeahhhhh!
X just ID'd me as a potential bot and I have no idea why... they say they put a label on my posts. Of which there are like 5 or 6 a day and on normal stuff.
I'm so sick of reading ai generated articles. Same tone. Same style overall. I can't read more than a couple paragraphs and unsubscribed from more than one content maker who used to be good as a result. I'd rather have fewer authentically written pieces than lots of drivel.
And the excess words! AI’s awful, but it’s only a direct descendent of Madison Avenue, corporate mediocrity and MBAs always trying to monetize something out of nothing. So doesn’t seem new to me.
Even worse are the Youtube videos. They're over half my "Premium" feed lately. After a few seconds of listening to the slightly-off voiceover and watching a series of random, often inappropriate stock photos and video footage, I get suspicious and scroll down to the disclosures and there it is: "How this was made; Made with AI; Sounds or visuals were altered or fully generated."
I'm actually not that good at detecting what content was actually created ("fully generated") by AI and what was only assisted ("altered"). In other words, I may have already fallen for some of the establishment media's brainwashing tactics. Yikes!
Don’t you love it when a voice-over pronounces Vancouver “Vancowver?” Usually my first clue is when the pronunciation is worse than ESL speakers.
You think you're not good, Danno? AI would smack me back and forth like a tennis ball and I would probably never know. I have little doubt that I've already unknowingly argued with an AI. It's like arguing with an 8 ball or a Ouija board.
the youtube videos are awful too and increasing in number.
I just wonder how many human articles will be flagged as false positives?
"If it floats, it's AI!"
If the article weighs the same as a duck, it's AI.
It's a fair cop!
Ha!
That's a real concern.
Are we using AI to detect and eliminate AI? I love the irony.
Freddie DeBoer has a good article about this. He found the program to be inaccurate. A 300 word excerpt from one of his posts was judged to be AI written but when the whole post was put in it was judged to be 100% human written. He got other inconsistent results with it. I would be highly skeptical of it.
I also read that article and I agree with Freddie that the tool does not work as advertised.
Probably because itself is AI based!
Couldn't this be used as another means of control? Any article or comment that says something they don't like, is flagged as AI content? Someone is setting up the algorithm to find something - so what if it's flagging dissent and unacceptable thoughts rather than AI writing style?
Absolutely!
Great point.
We need to treasure our pre-AI online sources and commenters.
I agree, Danno. We particularly need to treasure books!
An older printed book is harder to manipulate.
Yes, and it could even discern. It could flag politically incorrect AI while NOT flagging "correct" AI.
I would guess that's already happening, Ollo.
There are one or two Substack authors that I would look forward to running through this analysis >cough< Malone >cough<, based largely on a sudden avalanche of output.
However, I really hope this analyzing machine isn't heavily weighted against em dashes. We em dash aficionados are feeling unfairly persecuted. 😜
Yay emdashes!
Me too—but always tastefully.
> based largely on a sudden avalanche of output.
This!
I don't know Malone, but I've seen enough statistics from multiple politically diverse sources, to confidently state that it's down to the flip of a coin as to whether you're reading/seeing/hearing a human or an AI.
EDIT I had to come back and fix "IA" to "AI". That should prove I'm not an IA, I mean AI, lol
RE: Your edit: I think your original "mistake" was actually a Freudian slip that revealed the underlying truth that you are Iowa-phobic!
/s 😂
Lol, I didn't think of that! Now I owe IA a visit! I am 100% certain I would enjoy myself.
Tardigrade, why don't you run this Ai detector through Malone's posts before telling us you suspect his posts are Ai? Also maybe have Ai check that cough of yours, it might be cough >Tourettes< cough
FWIW, I tried out the underlying tool and found it very inaccurate. A 3000 word test article I fed into it came back with the claim of 100% AI-written. I suspect there will be a bit of a witch hunt coming.
A new Turing test... Can an AI write something that another AI will think was written by a human?
Lawyers, accountants and doctors are also trying to get keep their intellectual advantage so it's only natural for the word Smith's to attempt to gatekeep along with the intellectually elite academic class. Unfortunately time is not on your side. It is the formation of the human mind that is at risk and that is what should be protected. Not the tools that one employs but rather how one's thoughts are formulated. These are different conversations.
Its useful, no?
Outsourcing individual preference? And discretion to a third party is never useful. The argument is that you're going to use an AI to tell you whether or not the thing you're reading is from an AI. You're going to outsource your own discretion to the machine you're afraid of. And for the authors who's livelihood depends upon revenues from their subscribers, subscribers who might be turned off by a false positive this could be devastating. On the one hand, it's censorship and gatekeeping and on the other hand, you're just outsourcing more of your intellect to a machine... This subject is exactly the ontology and teleology of my substack and this is why I will never charge for any word posted.
When I read structure such as: Here... is what it is. Not..., not that,Its not such and such.
When did writers start using preface sentences before the substance.
I also see "Heres what you need to know" in some news stories. Needless and annoying. Let me decide what I "need" to know.
Word padding. Evidently much of that writing is remunerated, at least in part, by the number of words.
They're being too obvious in wanting to convince you to think a certain way. Apparently AI hasn't yet learned subtlety.
I think it may be an issue of people who are a bit too cock-sure of themselves. It can come across a bit condescending, and I am not pointing a finger at Gargoyle, because I'm pretty sure that I come across like that much too often. It's about tone, which I find difficult. Gargoyle's substance is sound and the point is made. However, Writing 101 - a writer has to consider the audience.
... One of the problems with dictating into a phone is that you get odd punctuation and capitalization. Driving along making a casual comment I hesitated and it inserted a? after the first statement which made it seem condescending... Then it capitalized the next word and created an odd sentence... I get how people will read that and while I will always take great pains to make sure the things I post on my channel are are exactly what I want to say, I don't feel that same need when making comments in an open forum. Seems most people these days on line take themselves far too seriously and when not online take themselves far less seriously than they should. I didn't really scrutinize the post until you made the comment of cocksure which implies condescension and I can see it now.. change the punctuation and it should read like more of a general comment on outsourcing your mind to a machine.
Absolutely true! If there's one thing that's bad for a society, it's society losing its ability to laugh at itself! Because boy are we hilarious!
No one should be surprised to see authors flailing in moral panic about artificial writing while simultaneously allowing AI to do all their research and create their graphics... The human side of the gargoyle already lived through such a transition over the last two decades in his professional life and he too was resentful that hard one skills were being replaced by trained monkeys pushing on a keyboard, but such is the nature of technology and creativity is not in the technique alone, but in the mind and AI does not have one... Either adapt or learned to weld...
It would appear from your two comments here that you might benefit from either an editor or an AI proofreader. Grammar, spelling, comprehension, and sentence/paragrah structure do not appear to be your strong suits.
Who cares, if his comment is meaningful? And I thought it was right on the mark!
It was incomprehensible, absent guesswork. But then you refer to yourself as a retired engineer THAT likes to read. Maybe start with English grammar.
Jeez! Relax already. You sound like Agent J's crazy teacher alien in the 4th grade!
There have been so many scifi movies made of a dystopian future where humans are just heads on a table or brains in a jar. AI is the opposite - a dystopian future where humans are just ambulatory bodies without any brains.
There's an old Star Trek episode where the Enterprise comes upon a malfunctioning spaceship drifting in space, and it turns out that the ship has done EVERYTHING for the inhabitants for many generations while travelling in space, and because no one on the ship has had to think for generations, they became complete idiots oblivious to what was around them and incapable of fixing even the simplest problem.
Wall-e did that conceit quite well!
Sometimes an article that sounds like it was written by AI (because it sounds like a speech by Barack Obama on a bad day) is actually written by a real person. Probably one who learned to write by watching bad Barack Obama speeches.
“…article that sounds like it was written by AI (because it sounds like a speech by Barack Obama on a bad day…”
Good one!
Brilliant! But AI will never have the self-assuredness of BO. Never.
BO actually did have a bad day on camera, remember? He was campaigning for KamLama and he actually tried to be black with a group of black guys. Ouch! He looked weak, ineffectual, and very much like a clueless white guy trying too hard to be a homey.
He didn’t think he looked bad.
I'd just say it was the worst I've ever seen. I distinctly remember cringing while watching. I don't remember ever cringing while watching him speak.
I am in no way meaning to disrespect you. Are you from, or live in Illinois?
If not, what do you know about Obama? There’s a lot to know.
That will now be eternally glorified in the Obama PresCent.
No, I'm not an Illini, which looks like rhymes with weenie, but actually rhymes with mai tai. However, he was a two term US President. As far as his political origins, I only know he rose very quickly to become a presidential candidate.
Other than that, I believe him to be a major player in the current horrid state of the country, and I also believe he deserves to do some time behind bars. Or maybe just paraded naked through the streets while citizens throw rotten things at him.
Yeah that was funny.
But back in the day, he was usually a pretty slick speaker
I saw reporting that he was interviewed lately, and dropped the “R” word. Not, “reparations,” but “Reconstruction,” while attacking the Veep. Can’t wait for the No Reconstruction protests, led by my local chapter of Indivisible. Just, wow.
Higher Ed uses Pangram. I did a little exercise where I asked Claude to generate a 1000 word essay on a topic. Pangram correctly identified it as 100% AI generated. I then put the Claude output into Stealth GPTs humanizer and pasted that output into Pangram. The result - Pangram identified my Claude created, StealthGPT edited essay as 100% human authored. For every AI detection tool, someone is working on an AI detection avoidance tool while we subsidize the data centers needed for the dance.
Sure sounds a lot like the designer drug market - as soon as law enforcement discovers the new formula, the formulators just change the formula and keep the train a runnin!
Not to sound too Boomerish here, but I've also read about articles being inaccurately labeled AI generated.
What recourse does a writer have, if his original work is slapped with an AI label?
I think we just have to go through this madness and get to rock bottom. People must be able to plainly see that there can be too much technology. There IS too much tech! I'm a retired tech pro, and I've been saying this since the early 2000's, and it's much worse today.
I believe tech addiction is on a similar path as crack cocaine.
Crack completely devastated low-income communities before those communities finally woke up. The younger generations saw abuse and were abused by crack-addicted adults, so they were repelled.
I think it has to get so bad, that the young ones coming up are so horrified by what they see, they reject it entirely. I guess we'll just have to wait for that to happen.
There may be a Butlerian Jihad in our future.
This looks great at first, but, as @Gargoyle Protocol noted, we won't do well relying on AI only, even to detect AI's presence. I assume the principle is similar to setting a third to catch a thief, but what if, as sometimes happens with thieves, the AI suddenly decides to cover for its cousin?
In any case, it isn't likely to be greatly useful to me - I am convinced the few Substacks I subscribe to are human-written, and the new tool will only work on Substack. Further, given what journalism schools are producing these days, I think it likely AI would do a better job than many. The deterioration of the quality of writing in journalism over the past 5 decades or so has made me shudder more than once. When I was little, my parents let me read The New York Times, and it exposed me to quite decent writing. Now, I would hide it until the child in question has sufficient grounding in good writing to discern its lack in those pages.
Must be some sort of correlation, if not causation, between that poor writing you mention and the now widespread belief that socialism has something to offer besides totalitarianism.
Lack of brain power and training, I believe, does for both. My parents were insistent I learn to think independently, though schools weren't so much, at least until college - and college wouldn't do that now.
Matt, I would rather infrequent actual words from you than frequent AI slop, even if curated to be as good as possible. You have my subscription $ because you tell the truth sporadically in a sea of BS. Keep doing what you are doing!
Anyone know if I can run this on my own comments? I would like to see how I stack up. I don't know if it would be a compliment or an insult to rank highly on the AI meter.
What if you find out you’re, in fact, AI? Now that would be a quandary! Maybe PKD already wrote about that.
https://originality.ai/
Thx. This is the first one I've used that didn't say my original writing was possibly AI.
Thanks!
It seems to require a paid subscription. I'm certainly NOT gonna pay just to see if it works.
I thought that too at first, but you kind of have to scroll up. I had given up when I inadvertently stumbled upon the results. Try again.
Thanks. I'll give it another shot.