> Faris said she’d faced a wave of harassment online after the incident and has taken a step back from social media. “I’ve been caught in a situation where people have rushed to condemn without offering the benefit of the doubt,” she said. “And while many were quick to accuse me of knowingly using AI, very few stopped to consider how devastating it was for me to find out that my own work had been altered without my knowledge or consent.”
> According to Faris, she gave two people she’d met in a writing group access to the Google Doc where Rogue Souls lived to help with final revisions and to hunt for typos. She said one of them used AI to fix sentences without her knowledge. “I want to be clear: I never approved the use of AI and I condemn it because [of the usual talking points...]
She could just publish the Google Docs document for people to review the edit history of. Not a Google Workspaces whiz, but my impression is that edit history is immutably retained, so unless one could reasonably speculate Google being in on the con, this would conclusively prove (support) her version of the story, particularly if the timelines work out. I wonder if she'd also have a legal case against the person who made the change.
Literary slop long predates AI.
It's a business like those assembly line Kinkade paintings. (I actually have one of them on the wall, and like it.)
In high school, I decided to read all the James Bond novels. After reading about 8 of them, I realized they all had the same plot, and abandoned that project.
The way to make money is to find a schtick that works and repeat and market it.
There’s a funny Behind the Bastards podcast episode on Kinkade, who apparently was kind of an asshole IRL.
Meanwhile other authors shovel out the exact same story (I found literal cut and paste more than once).
"Grok's Cheeky Enormous Large Language Model Pounded in the Butt by an Antisemitic Holocaust Denying Racist White Genocide Conspiracy Theory Promoting AI Prompt Dictated by Elon Musk That He Denied Fathering But That Just Happens to Reflect All the Conspiracy Theories He Has Been Tweeting Recently".
Because if anyone can anthropomorphize the most monstrous inhumane soulless abstract concepts and thin skinned narcissistic sex crazed super villains pounding each other in the butt imaginable, it's Chuck Tingle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Tingle
>Chuck Tingle is a pseudonymous author, primarily of niche gay erotica. His stories mainly take the form of monster erotica, featuring romantic and sexual encounters with dinosaurs, imaginary creatures, anthropomorphized inanimate objects, and even abstract concepts. He self-publishes his works through Amazon: primarily as ebooks, but also as paperbacks and audiobooks.
>In 2016, his short story Space Raptor Butt Invasion was a finalist for the Hugo Awards as the result of a coordinated campaign which he disavowed. In the following year's awards, he was a finalist for the Best Fan Writer award.
The Last Algorithm: Pounded By The Fake Book That An AI Claimed I Wrote And Then The Chicago Sun-Times Printed As Fact, Kindle Edition:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F99X5NPP
>When author Andy Mirror wakes up to a furious call from his publishing agent, he’s not sure what to make of it. Apparently, the Chicago Sun-Times has announced a new book that this agent was not a part of negotiating. It’s called The Last Algorithm.
>There’s just one problem: The Last Algorithm is not a real Andy Mirror book.
>Now Andy is struggling to unravel this mystery, headed to The Chicago Sun-Times building that is bafflingly empty, save for a few machines rolling around. When Andy encounters the physical manifestation of this fake book he is shocked, and strangely aroused, these feelings culminating in a hardcore pounding that will reshape journalism forever.
>This erotic tale is 4,200 words of sizzling human on fake AI generated book action, including anal, blowjobs, rough sex, and The Last Algorithm love.
"novels"
Editors needs to check the auto-corrections AND have language skills AND attention to detail. It is easy to ruin the reading experience.
Anyone want to give me a billion dollars?
Sold! I'll save at least twice that by firing all the human writers and editors!
Writing the damn book should be the job of the author.
> Faris denied she used AI in a post on Instagram and blamed a proofreader. “I wrote Rogue Souls entirely on myown [sic],” the April 17 post said. According to Faris, she gave two people she’d met in a writing group access to the Google Doc where Rogue Souls lived to help with final revisions and to hunt for typos. She said one of them used AI to fix sentences without her knowledge. “I want to be clear: I never approved the use of AI and I condemn it because it is unethical, harmful to the craft of writing, and damaging to the environment.”
> Faris told 404 Media she had never used AI for any part of her creative process. “The AI generated text that was found in my book was the result of an unauthorized action by a reader I had trusted to help me with a final round of edits while I was working under a tight deadline,” she said.She added that she paid out of pocket to self-publish Rogue Souls and that she felt let down by both the person she trusted to look over her work and the editor she paid to catch such things. “This experience has been a hard learned lesson,” she said. “I no longer share my manuscript with anyone. My trust in others has been permanently altered. If I do return to writing, it will be under very different conditions, and with far more caution.”
I.e. Subcontracting out part of the authorship, to some human. How much better is that than "hiring" an AI, directly, yourself?
Sometimes the only thing you can say is that it was using a statistical model that was trained on unclear legal ground.
Other times, you have people pushing the limits:
> It appeared as if author, Lena McDonald, had used an AI to help write the book, asked it to imitate the style of another author, and left behind evidence they’d done so in the final work.
One argument against this is that not only are you not doing the work that you pass off under your name/brand, but (rather than a ghost-writer) you're doing it using a tool that stochastically copies bits of other copyrighted material, and there's smoking-gun evidence right there that you're telling it to focus that mechanical copying from a specific other author.
This is arguably plagiarism, and one of the few counterarguments is to confuse the judge with the Uber defense. ("But it's an app! So your outmoded 'laws' and 'rules' do not apply to me! Because technology! Checkmate!")
Legitimately, an LLM would have caught these.
delichon•3h ago
<https://www.404media.co/authors-are-accidentally-leaving-ai-...> <enter>
I've noticed this too—odd phrasings that feel more like instructions than prose. It reminds me of early spellcheck glitches, but creepier. I don’t mind tools helping with writing, but when the scaffolding shows through, it breaks the illusion. It’s like seeing stage directions mid-performance. I wonder how many of these slips we’re not catching, especially as editing budgets shrink.
card_zero•3h ago
krisoft•2h ago
card_zero•2h ago
lostlogin•2h ago
rs186•3h ago
andrewinardeer•2h ago
WalterBright•2h ago
exe34•2h ago
quectophoton•1h ago
"it looked like a real message but the dot at the end gave it away"
There are similar opinions with artists too. Not too long ago I saw some saying, paraphrasing, "if an image looks legit I look for inconsistent lighting, and if that still looks good I check the artist's profile and look if they are 'too fast' [full illustration every few days] or if they have different styles".
I haven't seen anything like that with code, but I wouldn't be surprised if someone said that human-written code is actually AI-generated just because the structure looks weird to the reviewer, or because it has some "what" comments (instead of "why" comments; both have their place), or things like that.
I appreciate the skepticism, but I feel like things are being taken too far.
mmooss•1h ago
I think that's false. Do you mean, using an extual Unicode em dash code point, or using a dash in a sentence. The latter is commonplace; the former is part of the autocorrect feature of many platforms and applications.
> the wording is way too elegant compared to an average HN comment
Statistically, it's apparently about average. :)
WalterBright•2h ago
arrowsmith•2h ago
pstuart•2h ago
ihuman•1h ago
pstuart•43m ago
Arubis•2h ago
elaus•1h ago
SoftTalker•2h ago
arrowsmith•39m ago
Maybe in a few years LLMs will write more naturally without overusing em dashes so much. Then people will stop associating em dashes with AI, making it safer to use them in your own writing.