This headline was written before the article. Not because I know the first part to be true, but because I know the second part to absolutely be true.
I retrospectively put a bunch of my articles through an AI checker to see if they were ‘written by AI.’ Let me tell you reader, the suspense was killer!
I was stunned when Substack introduced an AI detection tool (Pangram) and my own writing was seen to have been written by AI (I think there was a %). WTF?!!! Ummm, s’cuse me? I’ll have you know that it was a) not written by AI, it was ‘all’ me, baby, b) By ‘all’ I mean, ‘I wrote it, and a handful of times I’ll feed it a sentence and ask for an alternative.’ Those instances are more when I’m trying to make sure I’ve explained a concept clearly. The type of work a good editor does - and has done for decades, c) I use it to check for typos/grammar.
This, to me, should not equate to ‘written by AI.’ So, for a little experiment, I’m going to draft the article, submit it to the AI checker, and then post the results in the final paragraph. It could be a big letdown - it could provide results of ‘AI would write way better drivel than this - all human!’ or it may give us another 91%! OR, it may read and understand the contents of this article and provide a knowingly false answer, the cheeky bugger.
The Novel and the Mysterious Case of the AI Author
But, I thought of this because if I had written a novel that sold in a 7-figure publishing deal only for it to be held up on claims of AI-use and I hadn’t used AI - then I would be mightily pissed! A recent novel, Call Me, I’ll Hide The Body, has been engulfed in a furore! It was sold to Minotaur/Macmillan Publishers for what sources said was a $2.4 million deal for the novel and a follow-up. Until allegations of AI-use surfaced.
And the pickle is that copyright comes into play because the AI generated text is an amalgam of other copyrighted text the AI gobbled up to be able to produce the stuff in the first place. It’s the Inception of Copyright! Absent from this discussion (that I’ve seen anyway) is the fact that the AI companies breached the fucking copyright of other people in the first place. That puts the new author in the predicament that they can be accused of copyright fraud if they did in fact use AI to generate text.
What a clusterf&*k!
We do need some form of AI-tagging to verify the (patent pending) Humanity Score of All The Things. But, as the use of AI increases - and I’m a fan of it as a tool to be clear - and bots begin to take over the world, there does need to be clarity about this. The issue predates AI - we’ve had humans and human-directed bots on social media creating false garbage for a decade or more. And the social media companies have done little to curb this in real terms - the reasoning being that if they can get you enraged, and glued to the screen furiously typing a response, then that’s more ads you see and more cashola for them.
The AI just makes it easier to create bullshit.
But, the absence of clear information - is this AI or not - takes away from my craft. For good or bad, I want you to know that I wrote The Thing. And if Pangram tells you that I didn’t, when I did, that’s a problem.
And then of course, where’s the line? If I train AI to write in my voice is it mine? We’ve developed tools that do exactly this (for clarity, this has not been used in my articles). If I have it produce a draft, and then be the editor to my AI self, is that still mine? A trickier question.
It might read like me, sound like me, and make the same average jokes as me, but is it me?
A question for the (new) ages.
Ok, so now for the big test. I’m about to throw this into Substack and do the review.
Now written after the Test
Well, dayum! This is what happens when you do a test with one subject…
Well, it got it right, this time. But why didn’t it get it right the last time?
The question I now have is what weighting is Pangram giving to spot checks on a few sentences in a 1,200 word article? Because that’s what I use it for, and it gave me a high ‘written by AI’ percentage in a previous article.
Imagine if I had used my own voice trained AI to write the article - it’d be full Klaxons sounding!\
- Ben
#BeAVillager