Thank you Dragon Age fandom... I guess??

[rynling]

Quillbot AI Detector
https://quillbot.com/ai-content-detector

I've found that AI detectors tend to be hit or miss, but this one seems to work well. What I especially appreciate about the way it works is that it's able to detect text that was generated by AI and then altered, either by hand or by another AI program.

I learned about this through discourse in the Dragon Age fandom, by the way. Apparently, you can now enter a short prompt into Gemini with the name of a character or ship, and the AI can match this keyword not only with the fandom, but also with its specific writing tropes.

If you're curious about the wank, people have been arguing about whether it's possible to write a 400k-word novel in a month. What this ridiculous argument underlines is the fact that there is a substantial (and passionate) audience for novels written by AI. This is dystopian, and I hate it.

Comments

[kalloway]

the AI can match this keyword not only with the fandom, but also with its specific writing tropes.

This doesn't surprise me, for a big enough fandom, but I rather expect it'd be shit.

whether it's possible to write a 400k-word novel in a month

I did enough NaNo meet-ups over the years to know it's absolutely possible. Did that person write a readable, coherent, good 500k+ novel? They sure didn't! But it was absolutely a fuckton of words. (and if I want garbage, I'd still rather it be human-made garbage because at least it'll be garbage with soul)

[rynling]

> I did enough NaNo meet-ups over the years to know it's absolutely possible.

Yes, this is exactly the sort of thing that people have been saying to derail the conversation, and this is how it became discourse. Alas.

ETA: Sorry, I think I might have phrased my reply in a weird way. I'm not accusing you of creating discourse! Rather, you hit the nail on the head; this is exactly the issue that became an unintentional sticking point for a lot of people in the conversation.

[kalloway]

Like, if someone said "oh I wrote this doorstopper in a month", I'd expect it to be followed up with "and then spent nine months editing it into something that is not a steaming pile of shit". But I'm guessing the latter isn't making it into the discourse.

In this era of Consume Content, I guess I'm not surprised by the bar being so low it's underground. (At the end of the day, I hate AI slop but the least people can do is fess up and label their AI slop so it can be avoided.)

[rionaleonhart]

Thank you for the link! This could be handy in my work as an editor, and also proved useful in a way I wasn't anticipating: I entered the opening of my most recently posted fic, out of curiosity, and it highlighted one paragraph as potentially refined by AI after being human-written. I hadn't used AI in any way, so I took a look at the paragraph, and I noticed an embarrassing mistake in it; I'd somehow written 'the two of us' instead of 'the two of them' in the narration of a third-person fic. So I've fixed that now; thank you for unintentionally helping me catch it!

[rynling]

For what it's worth, I found that the tool tends to be more accurate when you enter larger blocks of text.

To check its accuracy for myself, I entered text from five of my recent stories: two fanfics posted on AO3, two original stories, and one barely-edited WIP. When I entered the first paragraph of each piece, there were two false flags. When I entered the first three paragraphs instead, there were zero false flags.

Again, definitely a "for what it's worth" situation, but still.

Also hooray for finding a mistake in the first paragraph after posting. That is the story of my life lmao.

[runicmagitek]

That sound you heard was me screaming into my coffee ಠ⁠_⁠ಠ

ANYHOW. RE: can you write 400k words on a month... as mentioned above, I've definitely seen people crank out a ridiculous amount of words for NaNo in the past. I've even coughed up a lot of words in a month!! Not 400k, but I did have one (1) 150k month, which was only possible bc A) I was young, B) I wasn't working, C) I had no bills to worry about, and D) I was having a manic episode the whole time. Was what I wrote good?? It was probably salvageable. Were my methods healthy? Uhhhh no lol. Was it kinda possible under super specific circumstances? Kinda...?

And even then, I'm leaning to "yeah that sounds like AI" in this Dragon Age scenario. Which sucks, bc I'd prefer to give people the benefit of the doubt, but what the legitimate fuck. Thanks for calling this out. I also hate it.

[rynling]

Oh, definitely. Some writers do indeed have high wordcounts, and every day I’m grateful that they’re willing to put in the time to edit their writing and share the bounty of their work.

I will admit that I didn’t look at this mess for very long, but what seems to be the source of this particular Dragon Age flamewar is that one of the writers accused of using AI to post an unending flood of these massive fanfic novels is behaving badly by going on the warpath and claiming that the concerns regarding their use of AI are an attack on their preferred ship. Just basic fandom wank.

I think what the people expressing concern originally wanted is for the “authors” to label their work properly on AO3, which seems reasonable.

My own personal preference would be to get this shit off AO3 entirely. It’s super toxic to the community ecosystem, and it’s a direct challenge to the legal boundaries that allow transformative work to exist in the first place. Also I hate all the slop appearing in the tags, so there’s that as well.

In any case, it’s marginally interesting to see larger cultural concerns reflected in the microcosm of fandom, but there are other uses for my time on this earth.