Out of Curiosity

December 8, 2024 Longrider Fiction, Personal Stuff, Writing & Language 11

I’ve been writing my latest novel. The issue of AI has loomed large on the matter of writing lately. AI can be a useful tool for world-building, creating plot prompts, or shortcut using a thesaurus. But when uploading to Amazon, you are supposed to declare whether you have used AI to write the text or have used it to help. While I’ve dabbled a bit out of curiosity, my books remain human-written. So, again, out of curiosity, I put a passage of the current work through an AI detector:

**Text Quality Analysis:**

1. **Narrative Fluidity:** The text has a coherent narrative flow with clear actions and dialogue that build tension and intrigue. The transitions between sentences are mostly smooth, contributing to the readability of the passage.

2. **Imagery and Description:** The use of descriptive phrases, such as “slumped over a desk” and “his jaw dropped,” creates vivid imagery. The metaphor comparing the woman to a “jaguar about to strike” adds a layer of tension and complexity to the character dynamics.

3. **Characterization:** The characters are introduced with minimal but effective details. The man appears disoriented and vulnerable, while the woman is portrayed as confident and predatory, adding depth to their interaction.

4. **Dialogue:** The dialogue is natural and serves the purpose of advancing the story. It contrasts the physical actions and contributes to character development.

5. **Syntax and Structure:** The sentence structures vary in length and complexity, which is typical of human writing. There are a few fragments and run-on sentences that may suggest a more relaxed or informal style.

**Conclusion:** While the passage demonstrates clarity and engaging qualities that might suggest human authorship, its vivid imagery and emotional undertones can also be characteristic of advanced AI-generated text.

**Probability Percentage:** There is about a **40% probability that this text was written by AI**. The mixture of human-like nuances and stylistic choices makes it difficult to assign a higher percentage, as it could plausibly be authored by a human writer as well.

Okaaay, so I write like a bot… None of the passage was written using AI. It was all my own work. So, I’m not sure AI detection tools are much use… From a human perspective, AI-generated text is a bit lacking in emotion, if that makes sense. As a human reading it, something seems a bit off. I can’t put a finger on it as it’s just a feeling.

On that subject, I am still waiting for my latest Pascale Hervé novel to come back from Leggy before the final publication. The one I’m working on is a sequel to Renegade, but the central character is one of the antagonists in the previous story. I’m writing an anti-hero, so it’s interesting. And it’s all written by me.

11 Comments

  1. For excruciating examples of AI generated adverts, visit fleabay: they make my command of English look positively sparkling!

  2. A snippet from Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency:

    “The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder…. Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe.”

    Perhaps your Electric Monk can read works produced by AI for you, saving the effort of believing them to be worthy? Don’t teach them to write though.

  3. One of the problems with any AI is that it operates via algorithms written by humans and just like “He who pays the piper, calls the tune”, he who writes the algorithms determines the outcome. For example, if I make the AI search for two occurrences of “and” in a sentence, then that must be written by a computer. The reason being that I am old enough to have had primary school teachers beat that habit out of me.

    But there again, it is the way humans talk in real life and people link things together with ‘and” and do it unconsciously, and including it in dialogue is natural and expected. My primary school teacher would have made me rewrite that last sentence to read:

    But there again, it is the way humans talk in real life, people link things together with ‘and”, do it unconsciously so including it in dialogue is natural and expected.

    I’d also have been told to split it up as it is too long.

    So, which is it? If my primary school teacher was writing the algorithm, more than one “and” = AI generated. Me? More than one and is likely to be human generated (maybe).

    In other words, it is all borrocks (as they say in China) and your “40% likely to have been AI generated” demonstrates that it has a long way to go before I’d trust it even half way.

    • “if I make the AI search for two occurrences of “and” in a sentence, then that must be written by a computer”

      “There needs to be more space between ‘and’ and ‘and’, and ‘and’ and ‘and’.” seems appropriate here… 😉

      • Ran a recent recruitment exercise and checking that the applicants hadn’t used AI was an obsession with the HR department for some reason… given it’s going to f-t-f interview anyway, it seemed a waste of time.

  4. Really? You compared a woman to a “jaguar about to strike”? Don’t you know that modern jaguars don’t strike, they mince.

  5. The term Artificial Intelligence is a misnomer. There is no intelligence in it just a aggregation of material from various sources.

  6. Eh. 40%’s still comfortably on the right side of the ledger. I wouldn’t worry about it. Given that the detector’s probably running on an LLM itself, I wouldn’t trust it any more than all the other ones.

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