this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2026
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Fuck AI
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A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
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There's a study on this phenomenon, regarding text: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.07271
Basically, humans are mostly unable to tell apart human and AI text. They're on average about as good as rolling dice. And they'll say something is AI for the wrong reasons/cues.
Humans can tell if something sucks, and if it sucks they'll call it AI. That's not a reliable way to detect AI, though.
I don't think that's the entire story. I heard about the study from some German YouTuber. They spent several days writing the script for a video until the text was perfect (from their perspective). And that made their audience think they turned to AI assistance. So... Seems it both makes people think there's AI at work: Flaws in it, or being too flawless.
Idk. And from skimming the study, I gather you can train an AI to write exactly with the right amount of contractions etc, so we're F-ed anyway.
I take something being overly bland, repetitive or smooth in a weird way as indicators as well. After that I'll look at ChatGPT's distinctive idiosyncrasies. I think I'm not too bad at it, but sometimes it's really difficult. Even more so with some styles of images. Like pop art. I wouldn't know if something was made by AI or an artist. I mean by the image itself. I can probably tell if there's some layers of meaning in it, or if it's just some random thing depicted.
I guess "sucks" is relative, but for a normal person a lot of stuff that's "perfect" actually sucks. It's overly verbose, with lots of unnecessary adjectives and descriptors and punctuation that bloats the word count. It's technically good, but masturbatory. The "Look at how smart I am!" school of writing. There are people who write like this from their training, and they will be mistaken for AI.
I guess YouTube creators need to hit the right level of verbosity and detail anyway. They'll have to grab their audience's attention every video or people will inevitably click on the next video and somebody else is going to get the advertiser revenue.
I get it, though. Sometimes I'll write text and writing technical text is always a chore. I'll write something down but there's 5 exceptions to every rule, several side-effects and related things to explain, caveats and edge-cases. I can't completely lose track while originally trying to explain one concept. But oftentimes I can also not oversimplify it until it's wrong. Also bad if chapter 3 starts explaining everything in chapter 1 was a lie. 😆 Idk. I'll try to balance it out. Get it into some kind of order. But after revision XY it always sounds like a lawyer wrote it. Guess it's a bit of a different story with fiction. At least that doesn't need to be watertight with facts in the same way.