Stop Trying to Distinguish AI-Generated Writing From Human Writing Because You Can’t 11 ▲ James Zhan in real life. 59 days ago · Writing · hide · 2 comments I was just attending a virtual academic conference, where, frustratingly and annoyingly, 9 out of 10 sessions were about AI. But then, in one of the sessions that discussed human writing vs AI writing, I saw this slide: Human Writing (good) Machine Writing (or bad human writing) Idiosyncratic Cliched Circumlocutory Direct (in an obvious way) “Messy” Smooth and superficial Subtle (e.g. flip-flops mentioned once, in passing) Predictable Surprising Literal (“MUST WRITE ABOUT FLIP FLOPS”) Effortful for author and reader alike Easy for author and reader alike Fucking excuse me? This is so misleading and inaccurate on so many levels. For context, this session referenced a literary experiment held on The New York Times by an author to compare a section of fiction written by human (the author herself) vs generated by AI. At the conference, the session presenter—a university prof—asked their students to reflect on the experiment, and together they came up with the above “tells” of human… Log in to reply on the Fediverse. Comments will appear here. Jerry Orr @jerryorr@fosstodon.org 59 days ago [-] yeah, I get the frustration. I’ve always been a big fan of bullet points, bold text, and em dashes. Now I get self-conscious and worry that people will think my writing is AI-generated. I also understand the desire for authentic human content, and I also become wary when I see “good writing habits” that happen to “look like AI”. I don’t know what the solution is… Clare Hooley @clare_hooley@mastodon.me.uk 58 days ago [-] got to admit that bullet point list in the example feels a bit off, and it’s just that slightly off that makes you think AI, but that’s also simply because it’s promotional and ‘these are brilliant’ with nothing too much about why (other than ‘Apple should have done this’). We’ve trained ourselves to be cynical of glowing reviews, human or otherwise.
