Forum: Story Discussion and Feedback

There should be serious consideration places by the Web God here to mandate all AI stories be tagged so, or they risk being deleted.

He's already using AI detection tools and tagging stories that detect as (I believe he said over 50%) AI generated.

At least one author very publicly took his ball and went home over a disputed AI generated tag.

I strongly suspect that 'author' on the forum was an AI chatbot.

I strongly suspect that 'author' on the forum was an AI chatbot.

Which is why I hope that I'm not around when AI chatbot authors use AI tools to generate stories for AI readers. Where is Robert Heinlein whan you need him?

Too late! They are already posting on SOL.

That's why I refuse to fat shame authors I spot using AI.

I would also suggest that there should be some humility as to your ability to correctly identify what is AI.

So far I haven't been proved wrong in incorrectly identifying AI-assisted

There's no good way, short of author admission, to prove it either way. You aren't getting agreement from me here.

Doesn't your opinion that I need your agreement show a lack of humility?

I didn't say you need it. But the way your reply tries to justify your judgements implies that you want it. If you were uninterested in my opinion, why the effort to justify your judgement to me?

but I am curious as to why you think my judgement might be suspect.

Because, actually measuring the accuracy objectively is impossible.

Determining the error rate, false positive, or false negative, is impossible.

You think your judgment is accurate, and maybe it is, but you have absolutely no way of knowing for sure.

From aroslav's recent blog post, I'm considerably underestimating the amount of AI content. The recent flood of reincarnation stories are allegedly AI.

I wasn't suggesting that there aren't any AI stories (or even that there aren't a lot of them).

However, short of a poster admitting it, there is no way to know with certainty if a particular story is AI. It is at best a probabilistic assessment and there is no way to objectively validate the accuracy of those assessments.

I'm not suggesting that you can't or shouldn't say that you think that a particular story is AI.

What I am suggesting is a bit of caution as to the certainty with which those statements are made.

Actually it is possible to measure the error rate of these detectors (and thus also humans, although for humans it's slightly harder, as these learn, so you need much more "test data" or regularly fresh test data).

You cannot determinate if a text is human written or AI generated after the fact.

But you can determinate if you (the researcher) are involved in collecting the text.

So you get your data set.

Then you collect your "white mice" (test subjects, couldn't refuse that inside joke), be it AI detectors, open source or commercial ones, or humans, and run experiments with them.

Then you do statistics on the results.

Then you see rather clearly how well it works.

Reality is (I haven't checked how humans fare, but considering that we lose currently even for videos, shrug), but the state of the art for automatic LLM generated text detection is:

- small number of LLM with standard parameters -> 99% accuracy, with perhaps 5% false positives in the worst cases.

- allow arbitrary LLM or fiddling with the parameters -> and the detectors start to perform little better than random number generators. Basically it's an unsolved problem.

As mentioned, that's not some random opinion, that's the academic state of the art.

Now humans are on one hand a bit better: We notice if some stuff is inconsistent. Which is one of the weaknesses of LLM, especially many of them have limited context, and start to generate inconsistent details.

Now, I've been a book rat my whole life, I've got news here for you, sadly human authors (without the help of professional editors, and even then) do make these continuation errors too. Some are better at it, some are worse, but just because somebody mixes up the names of some auxiliary figure in a story does not make it an AI
generated story, especially not on an online website.

But you are definitely wrong, determinating the error rates is possible, and scientists are doing it all the time, that's literally their daily job.

As mentioned, that's not some random opinion, that's the academic state of the art.

Can you cite an actual research paper on that?

Because I doubt the validity of the claimed accuracy even with a limited number of LLMs and default parameters.

It would be interesting to see the methodology.

Dom

https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-emnlp.609/

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Automatic-Detection-of-LLM-Generated-Code%3A-A-Case-Rahman-Khatoonabadi/636bd4fe4675949eff7040a8ee35016356f0c9af

https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.23517

That's why I doubt claims that anybody can decide if a text is written by an AI or a human reliably, post facto.

It's the medium (electronic text, text/plain), which as such is by default free of forensics, that leads basically to statistical methods for author analysis.

And these lead to values that are prefixed by something with a lowercase p, if you get the insider joke.

Exactly, there is no way, provably.

An LLM can recreate exactly the same content independently, a human can recreate the same content independently.

That's why the IP mafia inventeted patents.

With physical art, there is at least a physical object you can investigate to check if it's consistent with the claimed history.

With digital text files there are literally no fingerprints, no chemical residue, no paper to analyze, …

Not much to go on, beyond textual statistics, and these detectors as the academic papers I've looked up today have inacceptable false-positives in the best cases, and are a joke when one starts to fiddle with LLM parameters, or instead of using a tiny list of LLMs to generate the "AI texts", all LLM available are allowed to play. Suddenly the "99% accuracy" detectors become not really better then rolling dice. Or as the English idiom is, snake oil.

How do you prove that? That's literally not provable.
Even if the author had a video record of him/herself typing the whole story, you cannot be sure that it was not generated before by AI, right?

It's literally hard for physical art in many cases to decide if a piece is truly done by the claimed original artist or fake.

But for a collection of bytes, by definition, you cannot say if string of bytes was created by careful composition by a human or by a mathematical function.

Yes you can observe in the first place, so you can put labels on files, oh, these were typed in by humans, these were generated by LLM, and derive from that statistical predictors again, but these will stay predictors.

There is also nothing that keeps an LLM from recreating a certain value of a file, nor a human of reentering the file content.

So your claim that you haven't been proven wrong in incorrectly identifying AI-assisted stories, would require a rather complicated controlled experiment, and I doubt that's what you are referring to, right?

How many death-row inmates in the USA were exonerated after they were sentenced upon a verdict beyond reasonable doubt?

As mentioned the threshold needs to be set very carefully (or not, shrug, in classroom environments, the goal can be often arbitrary, if the something else is the training goal), and matched to process and the goals one wants to achieve.

Not sure what Lazeez wants to achieve with running an LLM generated detector on stories.

Anyway, there is a reason why EU law forbids algorithmic output to have direct impact on humans without a real human in the loop.

E.g. as a thought experiment, Amazon introduced an "AI generated" tag for kindle books.

The false positives could have literally livelihood destroying side-effects on innocent authors.

No idea how Canada handles that stuff, nor is storiesonline big enough to be on the radar.

But notice that WLPC also operates ZBookStore so the ruining the reputation of a SO author who is selling books here might also have monetary damages, sigh.

So I certainly wonder what exactly is the idea behind automatically labeling stories as AI content ->

- it's unreliable
- it does not provide value to the users

I mean user trainable private categories (it might be for starters even just Bayes based ones), that would be a value proposition. (I personally have not implemented that for my private use, as the download limit would make it a bit problematic, but in the past year I lost my shyness to doing browser addons, sigh)

Few of those were either factually innocent, as opposed to legally not guilty. Many had not exhausted the standard appeal process.
Time had passed in most of these cases or political pressure blocked retrials with the trial errors corrected.

If we have to execute 1 innocent person in order to execute hundreds/thousands of guilty murderers then it is moral and right.

If we have to execute 1 innocent person in order to execute hundreds/thousands of guilty murderers then it is moral and right.

The men who wrote the US Constitution drew the opposite conclusion.

I forgot who said it and I am paraphrasing it.
"I would rather see 10 guilty go free then see one innocent be convicted."

The men who wrote the US Constitution also executed people within weeks of them being convicted of crimes and with far less evidence than is available in the modern system so that's not exactly the best argument to make.

Isn't that the definition of democracy? Where the mob over-rules the individual?

Which is why the authors of the US constitution created a constitutional republic, not a democracy.

The unamended constitution defines six offices, of which only one (Representative) was to be elected by the people. Not very democratic is it?

A constitutional republic IS a form of democracy. they are not mutually exclusive.

No, they are not mutually exclusive, but they aren't co-extensive either. It's perfectly possible to have a republic that is not a democracy at all.

And as I said, the democratic elements in the original US constitution before any amendments were fairly minimal. One out of six offices elected by the people.

And that one office was only voted on by a select group of people. The founders never would have envisioned the state of the current country. They'd have watered the tree ages ago.

Sure tell yourself that.

The Founding Fathers, who fought an independence war (how many of the FF lost their lives because of that, or their livelihoods), so that the rule in the colonies moved from the London elite to the local elite.
(oops the FF just happened to have disproportionately many wealthy land owners, slave owners, elite lawyers … among them. Paint me surprised.)

While for 99% of the population in the colonies little changed, besides that the flags raised on holidays changed.

No, that's majoritarianism.

Democracy is generally considered the sovereignty of the citizens, rule of law, and protections of certain rights one cannot give away (like human rights) but also protections of minorities from the mob rule of the majority.

Now many English-speaking countries that derive their constitutions to early experiments in democracy tend to majoritarianism due to its simplicity. The UK with the Parliament is supreme, and fuck everybody else. The USA with their own problems due to their federal history (which nowadays has been strongly rewritten, cough, in public perception).
But it happened outside the English language-sphere, e.g. Switzerland, which till a couple decades wasn't even a member of the United Nations, as that would conflict with the sovereignty of its citizens and their beloved referendums.

But then a Ford T is by today's standards also a simple car. That does not make it a fully functional car by today's standard, even if it's a car.

So yes, majoritarianism is a form of democracy, certainly, but not really up to modern standards.

The Founders of the US expressly rejected that idea and built a system to protect individual rights from the mob.

Umm... Not really. They struck a different balance than had existed before, and that balance has been tipped since by Supreme Court cases, but there's ALWAYS an acceptance that security for society my involve a loss in personal liberty and rights for the individual at some point. This is a universal of the human values system. See the work of Shalom Schwartz, et al.

If anything we execute far too few people. Of those 200 the number that hadn't killed or been involved in killing someone in their lifetimes is minimal too.

The arguments are complex, but one factor that needs taking into account is the existence of - and moral consideration of - an alternative. So, an alternative to execution is imprisonment without the possibility of parole, thus no likelihood of reoffending. And denying abortion to the victim of rape seems to me to be compounding the harm to the victim.

Forcing the population to pay taxes to sustain the lives of murderers and rapists isn't a moral alternative in any way. Add to that the issues with lawyers and judges finding reasons to eventually release those murderers back into society makes allowing them to live incredibly immoral.

If murder is wrong (which it is)

Define "murder." If defined as, "the unlawful killing of another human being with malice aforethought" of even just "unlawful killing," then execution for certain crimes after prescribed justice procedures as specified by a duly constituted legal authority is not "murder."

But when people argue that the death penalty is wrong, I generally counter with "Why does the killer's right to life supersede the right of the victim to have had a life?"

My issue with the death penalty comes from a different direction.

I don't think the death penalty is immoral, if you have certainty that you are executing the right person.

My problem is that I don't trust the government to get the determination of who the killer is right.

Think about this: If they execute the wrong person, now you have two innocent victims, and a killer still on the loose.

In my opinion, beyond a reasonable doubt is insufficient. Anything short of absolute certainty is (in my opinion) insufficient for the death penalty.

here is little doubt as to their guilt.

Little doubt is not zero doubt. Zero doubt is the proper standard for the death penalty.

THIS. And zero doubt is impossible standard, and thus death penalty is unusable.

And from a different angle, death penalty is not a punishment. It is retaliation, yes, but it isn't punishment.

What is punishing, is living in a death row, perpetually waiting for an unknown date of execution. (Although it could be argued we all live in that situation, having it as imposed sentence is a bit... different).

Therefore my current stance is that death penalty should be on the books and be given out as a sentence, but be never, or exceedingly rarely executed.

In practice, it should be reserved for cases of war and similar emergencies.

Yeah, but by European standards, the USA is not a civilized society. In many ways, when it comes to moral and ethics.

And their "only answer" is, universal healthcare is unaffordable. And taxes are "stealing".

To that I do have to point out that in Europe, most countries have some form of "universal healthcare" (yeah, they are not all equal) for over half a century. And it's not perfect, but yes, the idea that you might need to think about buying medicine or buying food, is more of a Hollywood plot-line, than an European one.

(Remember human rights, letting people starve or go without life saving treatment is incompatible. And yes these "liberals" don't get it always right, but they do generally get it right. Anyway, it's literally in some of our constitutions, that society must allow for a dignified life, no matter what.)

So I'm not completely sure how Americans arrive at the conclusion that "universal healthcare is unaffordable" when "universal healthcare" has existed in Europe as a mainstream policy for over 50 years, in some cases for well over a century, going back to Imperial times.

(The German system's nucleus e.g. was literally introduced by the conservatives in the 19th century, to counter tendency of workers to organize themselves in unions and parties. Literally when the German still had an Emperor.)

And the approach to corrections, prison, punishment, shrug, it's literally about 2 centuries apart in the USA and Europe.

I just read this week a really good story of an author who I really appreciate, who had to make a point and "trans-women raping women in prison", making the point that "women had become pregnant in prison". (Hint: women do become pregnant in prison, by their COs, but hey, that's not a topic that American public cares about, right?)

I just rolled my eyes, and shrugged, and wondered what would the Americans think that some forward thinking governments like the Spanish have been testing cohabitant prisons (for non-violent, non-sex-offenders obviously) were prisoners literally can become pregnant in a totally expected manner.

If civilized means allowing ourselves to be overrun by third world Muslim invaders then I'll remain uncivilized thanks. Now all of the actual Europeans get to enjoy being taxed to death for the rest of their lives to pay for healthcare for third world savages. Congrats.

Not executing the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.

There is a case here in AZ where a guy serving 16 life sentences for multiple murders and assaults killed 3 other prisoners that were jailed for lesser crimes. The state is being sued for not protecting the other prisoners. What possible value is there in keeping him alive?

There's absolutely no reason he should have been kept alive. He should have had his neck stretched on the day he was pronounced guilty.

Congrats, since your shitty future Islamic country abolished the death penalty your tax money now gets to be wasted to pay for sustaining the life of pieces of shit like Axel and countless Muslims that have spent the past 20 years systematically raping little girls.

Nope, he should have been drowned the day he was pronounced guilty.

No, broken up for transplant parts

Even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in awhile.

It's hard to say opps after you executed an innocent person.

It's hard to say opps after you executed an innocent person.

Worse, the real guilty party walked away clean. Even worse, you spent possibly decades not looking for the guilty party and now have a cold trail.

And it's basically impossible to find someone that's actually innocent on death row or imprisoned for life on murder charges. Even the couple that may not have committed the crime they're in for have committed dozens of others.

You are so full of shit. In a 2014 study it was estimated 4.1% on death row are innocent.
https://repository.law.umich.edu/facarticles/1591/#:~:text=We%20use%20survival%20analysis%20to,sentences%20in%20the%20United%20States.

Estimated by the same shitbags that are responsible for the changes in the court system that result in people that have 50+ arrests being let go with slaps on the wrist.

And it's basically impossible to find someone that's actually innocent on death row or imprisoned for life on murder charges. Even the couple that may not have committed the crime they're in for have committed dozens of others.

8 People Who Were Executed and Later Found Innocent

1. Cameron Todd Willingham—In 1992, Willingham was convicted of arson murder in Texas. He was believed to have intentionally set a fire that killed his three kids. In 2004, he was put to death. Unfortunately, the Texas Forensic Science Commission later found that the evidence was misinterpreted, and they concluded that none of the evidence used against Willingham was valid. As it turns out, the fire really was accidental.

2. Ruben Cantu—Cantu was 17 at the time the crime he was alleged of committing took place. Cantu was convicted of capital murder, and in 1993, the Texas teen was executed. About 12 years after his death, investigations show that Cantu likely didn't commit the murder. The lone eyewitness recanted his testimony, and Cantu's co-defendant later admitted he allowed his friend to be falsely accused. He says Cantu wasn't even there the night of the murder.

3. Larry Griffin—Griffin was put to death in 1995 for the 1981 murder of Quintin Moss, a Missouri drug dealer. Griffin always maintained his innocence, and now, evidence seems to indicate he was telling the truth. The first police officer on the scene now says the eyewitness account was false, even though the officer supported the claims during the trial. Another eyewitness who was wounded during the attack was never contacted during the trial, and he says Griffin wasn't present at the crime scene that night.

4. Carlos DeLuna—In 1989, DeLuna was executed for the stabbing of a Texas convenience store clerk. Almost 20 years later, Chicago Tribune uncovered evidence that shows DeLuna was likely innocent. The evidence showed that Carlos Hernandez, a man who even confessed to the murder many times, actually did the crime.

5. David Wayne Spence—Spence was put to death in 1997 for the murder of three teenagers in Texas. He was supposedly hired by a convenience store clerk to kill someone else, but he allegedly killed the wrong people by mistake.

The supervising police lieutenant said "I do not think David Spence committed this crime." The lead homicide detective agreed, saying "My opinion is that David Spence was innocent. Nothing from the investigation ever led us to any evidence that he was involved."

6. Jesse Tafero—In 1976, Tafero was convicted of murdering a state trooper. He and Sonia Jacobs were both sentenced to death for the crime. The main evidence used to convict them was testimony by someone else who was involved in the crime, ex-convict Walter Rhodes. Rhodes gave this testimony in exchange for a life sentence. In 1990, Tafero was put to death. Two years later, his companion Jacobs was released due to a lack of evidence…the same evidence used to put Tafero to death.

7 & 8. Thomas Griffin and Meeks Griffin— The oldest case on this list dates back to 1915. The Griffin brothers, two black men, were convicted of the murder of a white man. The reason they were convicted is because Monk Stevenson, another black man suspected of committing the murder, pointed to the brothers as having been responsible. He later admitted the reason he blamed them is because they were wealthy, and he assumed they had the money to beat the charges. The Griffin brothers were completely innocent, but they were put to death nonetheless.

==============================================

California man gets $25M for wrongful conviction after 38 years in prison.

Maurice Hastings, 72, was convicted and sentenced to life in prison without parole in connection with the 1983 sexual assault and murder of Roberta Wydermyer, who was killed by a single gunshot to the head.

The lawsuit accused two Inglewood Police Department officers and the Los Angeles District Attorney investigator at the time of framing Hastings.

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North Carolina man settles for millions after wrongful conviction, 44 years in prison.

CONCORD, N.C. — A man wrongfully convicted and imprisoned for 44 years has reached a $25 million combined settlement with a central North Carolina city and the state of North Carolina involving a lawsuit accusing authorities of misconduct, the man's lawyers said Tuesday.

The settlement, which will end a wrongful incarceration lawsuit filed by attorneys for Ronnie Wallace Long in 2021, also included a public written apology from the city of Concord for its role in his imprisonment. The city, located about 25 miles (40 kilometers) northeast of Charlotte, has agreed to pay $22 million of the settlement.

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Georgia Man Spent Year in Jail for Owing Child Support After DNA Proved He's Not the Father.

A Georgia prosecutor and judge saw nothing wrong in 2008 with their decision to imprison a man for not supporting a child he did not father. Such is the case of Frank Hatley, 50, who thought he had fathered a son from a relationship in the 1980s, and paid almost $10,000 in child support—even when he was unemployed and homeless.


Last year, Charles Reddick, a special assistant state attorney general, and Cook County Superior Court Judge Dane Perkins agreed that Hatley still had to pay $16,398 in child support—despite the knowledge that two DNA tests proved Hatley was not the father after all. Unable to pay the additional support, Hatley was thrown in jail, and remained there until last week when Perkins agreed to free him. The judge, however, postponed a decision on whether Hatley still has to make any more back payments on the outstanding sum.

You actually look into any of those?

1. The guy's neighbors testimonies are damning as fuck, the guy calmly pushed his car out of the garage and then went to sit by a tree as they were telling him to try to go inside and rescue his fucking kids.

2. The people that recanted got bribed by an anti-death penalty group, the guy also confessed to several other crimes including shooting a cop 4 times. So as I said, even if he wasn't guilty of the crime he was fried for (he was) him being executed was still beneficial to society.

3. Another shitbag with a lengthy criminal record including second degree murder in another case, good riddance.

4. LOL another piece of shit 2 time felon that was found shirtless with a bunch of crumpled up bills in pocket hiding underneath a car and claimed he had amnesia of the whole night.

5. The biggest issue with this one was that they didn't execute the other 3 people involved in the murders. Spence was already serving a prison sentence for raping a man and was connected to the rape of a 17 year old girl as well.

6. Another winner, the guy had an attempted robbery conviction and was on probation for attempted rape when he murdered two police officers.

7/8. Crazy that you had to go back 110 years to find one that was legit and didn't involve shitbags being executed.

The other listed cases prove that now that DNA is available to exonerate people there's not really a reason for the death penalty to be off the table, I would also use it for corrupt people like Charles Reddick and Judge Dane Perkins.

And yet not once did you include a link to back up your claims.

LOL, that's crazy, because neither did you and only your last 2 were actually exonerated so basically your first 6 were just bullshit speculation based on nonsense and none of them were actually proven innocent.

And around here, there are a lot of nuts.

I've done a nice test on the current state of video generating AIs (they are currently resource limited to short clips), and I literally managed to to detect humans/AI generated clips with around 66% reliability (the clips were short clips, where the first full frame was taken, and the gen AI was asked to create a clip from that)

And that's basically the conclusion on LLM detection too:

However, widely reported "99% accuracy" claims collapse to 19-52% accuracy when tested on unknown models using random sampling with repetition penalties—settings increasingly common in modern LLM deployments.

So basically, the things works against ChatGPT with the default parameters. It still works if you include half a dozen mainstream bots like Gemini and CoPilot to the possible culprits. The moment people start playing with the sliders (which "for creative writing" as a bot, or in an agent style use is basically mandatory), all these "detectors" become snake oil. Especially if you run them in a unsupervised way. If you want a plausible verdict, hire a data scientist that looks at the text and runs a a number of detectors on the text and analyzes the results. That might be possible for an important legal dispute, but not a story website, I admit.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.23746

The irony here is, these "AI written text detectors" become exactly what one is supposed to avoid, "badly deployed, unsupervised AI deployments, where AI output, the verdict is it AI generated or not, is shown to the public without a check by a human".

I literally managed to to detect humans/AI generated clips with around 66% reliability

I question the validity of the assessment.

Assuming for the sake of argument that the assessment is valid, I would call that guessing.

Well, some people in my Mastodon time line with, how did they put it, a master degree with something video/media in the title, managed to have a correct detection rate of 80%.

And I completely believe them that they do know the field a bit, because their explanation of the details that they did check during the 5-10 seconds playbacks of the videos included many things technical aspects I never ever heard off.

Or in other cases knowledge that some effects never happen in such situations, with real physics and optics, which the AI obviously haven't yet heard of.

But for a lay person like me, how the f%ck should I know that this effects don't happen on regular cameras?

I agree on the difficulty finding stories to engage me lately. I am hoping that its just a lag while some the better authors work on new postings.

Honestly, I would rather read a "Mad Libs" story than most of the AI crap I see.

Isn't that what AI stories are? Give a few words and AI guesses the rest.

40+ tags on a 4kb story is nature's way of saying do not click.
ASSTR went down, AO3s terms of service make clear they are only there for data mining. Amazon AFAIK no longer allows incest stories. I guess that particular brand of pervert needed a new home.

Typing a random location, item or idea into the search bar will often turn up unexpected gems. Quite often I've tried to fill a lost story request by searching a relevant line, only to spend the next two hours reading a different story.

Of course he doesn't have anything to back it up, he's just making noise because his bridge is lonely.

Your first example was likely made with Suno. You can see another example here: https://suno.com/hook/8c5f39fb-a96a-4a5d-9433-40075a273615

This is making the rounds on X right now. We're steps away from genAI being indistinguishable from real life.

https://x.com/MAGACult2/status/2008922663000142282

I was really hoping that was going to be a link to the Irish version of Me Mum Died in the Holly.

You do realize that you can split these ~500 token outputs to get smaller chapters, and you can paste multiple chapters into one file to get a longer file.

Plus that seems only for the simplistic workflow of generating stuff with a trivial chatbot, not using more complex tools.

You heard the concept of false positives?

Curious are you willing to tell what you use for as a predictor function for "AI generated"?

Curious are you willing to tell what you use for as a predictor function for "AI generated"?

I hope he doesn't - otherwise people will adjust the AI output to hide. See, for example, earlier threads where spaces around m-dashes was discussed. If people want to send predictors to Lazeez, it should be direct, not via a forum post!

Ah, I wondered, only because I blundered today about an author (who has been here for more than a decade) complaining about his style suddenly triggering false-positives.

And as far as I know the problem of deciding if something is AI written is scientifically not solved, nor completely solvable.

At best you can get a probability score, cynically, that's "AI", if you want, it's probably a ML model that is used to spit out that probability when presented with the input tokens.

Purely philosophically, and from a system design point, it's always a question how this embedded in the whole system and processes.

E.g. take "AIgenerated?" in the context of education.
Checking homework/theses for AI output can be handled in two different ways:

- if AI content is detected, you kick out the student. (okay, perhaps hyperbole, but that's the bad way)

- if AI content is detected, you quietly add the student and the work to the "random" intense oral examination heap. If the student did the work, oral exam will in most cases be no real hardship. If the student basically copied the solution from "fellow student Mr. AI", generally that will show in an exam interrogation.

As I've been preaching for some time now (that AI study course makes one think about these stuff), it's always about the complete system. The same LLM can work quite differently depending upon the "business processes", the software that drives it, the prompts, and other subtle details.

Last but not least, if somebody wants to figure out what predictor Lazeez is using, it's probably a short exercise:
- he mentioned it costs to use it, so that suggests he uses a 3rd party one. Probably not something that he can run locally. Probably also not something that he self-hosts in a cloud, although that's a possibility.

- so you take a sample of say 30 stories, 15 labelled AI, 15 not labelled so, on the shorter perhaps, take a short market overview what AI text predictors are available for Canadian companies, and run these 30 stories through these predictors.

- my data scientist side suggests that you will probably have either a more or less clear favorite for the predictor he uses, OR you'll discover that there is a number of predictors that perform very similar.

- And finally, you can almost certainly, even with the download limits, get a big enough training set from SO directly to train a predictor yourself.

- if AI content is detected, you kick out the student. (okay, perhaps hyperbole, but that's the bad way)

- if AI content is detected, you quietly add the student and the work to the "random" intense oral examination heap. If the student did the work, oral exam will in most cases be no real hardship. If the student basically copied the solution from "fellow student Mr. AI", generally that will show in an exam interrogation.

Both of these "solutions" are problematic at the K-12 level. And yes, there are K-12 teachers in the US complaining about students using AI to do homework.

The first is impossible for any public school. Government schools can't expel students.

The second is impractical. K-12 schools are not set up to conduct routine oral examinations.

I remember reading about a Masters or Phd candidate who was expelled when a professor recognized copying from his own thesis done years back at a different university. The student later admitted that he took some of the thesis from AI as "research." The AI had obviously been fed the professor's thesis. The stated reason for expulsion was, presenting someone else's work as his own.

a Masters or Phd candidate

Yes, at a university. That has less than nothing to do with my comment which was about the impracticality of the proposed solutions at the K-12 (grade school and high school) level.

I don't advocate expelling students, that was given as an example of stupid, bad policy.

And if they are not set up to verify the competence of pupils one on one, then you have an issue with your education system.

I completely understand that this would be expensive and work intensive. Oops.

But then I can compare here in Europe the university of my youth in the 1990s, where for my technical degree practically all exams were "bring whatever you can carry yourself into the lecture hall" open book, and required true understanding of the subject matter.

And then we switched to the bachelor/master system, university suddenly got much less money, the 5 year master-level degree was turned into 8 different specialized bachelors and 4 follow up masters, the catalogue of >100 specialization classes was cut by 50% and turned into mandatory classes in one of the new study courses and electives in the others.

And of course because the number of TAs was curtailed, the exams turned from open book, understanding based to multiple choice, simplified checking if you have looked at the lecture notes.

Funny thing, I'm doing another technical/mathematical study course now that I'm a bit older, and the experience is totally different.

The real odd thing is, that for many classes going through the slides (not lecture notes) 1-2 days before the "exam" is enough to get a passable grade nowadays (at least for me), which is sad, considering that it's still a hard study course with ~80% dropout rate.

So yes, the issue is if your education is set up for "mass production" without the teacher being able to know their pupils, you have a problem, because then the pupils can get away with submitting the output of others (even the output of a LLM in some cases) as their own.

That's actually why in my country our "mandatory schools" (the ones where everyone has to go to, basically the weaker pupils) tend to be set up to have 2 teachers in parallel for languages and math, interestingly the "better" schools in the track for going to university (which can select their pupils, and also eject them) don't have such luxuries, they are harsher.

I don't consider a person that uploads "AI Generated" stories an author but that's just my opinion. I've finished a grand total of 1 story to date and I don't consider myself an author either...

SunSeeker

The pain people are willing to accept.

Chat interfaces (like chatgpt) are absolutely, IMHO unusable for creating/editing/improving things.

But listening here, that seems to be the common modus operandi.

Chat interfaces (like chatgpt) are absolutely, IMHO unusable for creating/editing/improving things.

But listening here, that seems to be the common modus operandi.

I agree with you, general purpose chatbots are unusable for this.
There are purpose built story writing AI engines out there.
I haven't posted anything AI generated yet, but I've been playing around with one (https://novelai.net). The problem people will run into with these is that they aren't free to use.

I hope that's to pay royalties to the authors whose in-copyright works they used for training ;-)

You have got to be kidding. You know it is only to enrich the AI companies.

Well, I personally am interested in creating the tools, and as it happens I do have the hardware at home to run relatively big LLM.

And some of the online gambling sports books are being run with AI's.

And some of the online gambling sports books are being run with AI's.

A lot depends on what they are using AI for.

A lot depends on what they are using AI for.

I wonder what the score was between West Ham and Maccabi Tel Aviv :-)

AJ

From Facebook's Meta AI this morning:

"The Duke Blue Devils lost to the Indiana Hoosiers in the CFP National Championship game with a score of 27-21. However, I suspect you're referring to their recent games. Here are some recent results ¹:
- _Duke Blue Devils vs. Indiana Hoosiers_: The Hoosiers won 27-21 in the CFP National Championship game on January 19, 2026."

That AI summary might lead you to think that Indiana beat Duke in 2026, but the 2026 championship was Indiana vs Miami.

https://www.ncaa.com/live-updates/football/fbs/indiana-defeats-miami-win-college-football-playoff-national-championship-game

I know. I watched the game.
Sad that the bowl committee took the ACC's 3rd place finisher instead of the champion.

"The Duke Blue Devils lost to the Indiana Hoosiers in the CFP National Championship game with a score of 27-21. However, I suspect you're referring to their recent games. Here are some recent results ¹:
- _Duke Blue Devils vs. Indiana Hoosiers_: The Hoosiers won 27-21 in the CFP National Championship game on January 19, 2026."

And that's what a proper AI research agent like perplexity answers, when you paste the above paragraph, and add "Verify these claims for me please, and give a one paragraph summary."

The claims in the quoted text are incorrect. According to multiple authoritative sources, the CFP National Championship game on January 19, 2026, was played between the Indiana Hoosiers and the Miami Hurricanes, not Duke Blue Devils and Indiana. Indiana defeated Miami 27-21 to win their first-ever national championship, completing an undefeated 16-0 season. The game was held at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens, Florida, and featured Indiana as the No. 1 seed and Miami as the No. 10 seed. Duke Blue Devils won the ACC Championship in 2025 but did not qualify for the College Football Playoff, finishing their season 9-5 after defeating Arizona State 42-39 in the Sun Bowl on December 31, 2025.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_College_Football_Playoff_National_Championship is given as one of the references as a footnote after the paragraph.

As I'm saying till I'm hoarse, relying for LLM training data for your knowledge is a high-risk proposition, as there is literally no indication if the output is non-sense (aka the so called hallucination) or really a statistical "recall" from training data.

Anybody with basic knowledge (they don't need to study the subject) can tell you.

Fewer (because good tools like these are not as common) can tell you that LLM works quite well for NLP tasks, and surprising well (if not always perfect) for orchestrating tasks.

Grey Goosed?

I think we're actually not far from the point where a good model with a body of work could write stories you couldn't distinguish from ones I wrote. That both impresses and depresses me.

Was this post written by you, or an AI trained on your posts? Forget that, how would I be able to tell if the response was generated by an AI purporting to be you?

edited to add: likewise my post. (Except who would bother?) Perhapse the presence of typos is now an indicator of genuineness.

Me, despite the comments about starting each paragraph with 'I'. Didnd't even use AI to spellcheck or proofread it. And no sentence in this response begins with that accursed letter! 🤪

And that's precisely what a competent ML simulator would say!

a few months ago there were many of these on FB "Reels". Freakin horrible imo

SunSeeker

I wish people would quit pretending Pakis and Indians are "Asian."

India is an Asian subcontinent. It is not part of Africa or Europe.

If we really need to replace 'Oriental' to designate those with distinctive eyes and yellowish skin, then we need to find a replacement for 'Asian' because 'Asian' can mean anything other than African black.

We should just abandon the idea of "race" completely and just use ethnicity.

Even among sub-Saharan Africans, there's significant phenotypic differences between different tribal groups.

The construct of "race" creates a small set of umbrella groups for traits that are continuously variable across local population groups.

As to Orient/Oriental specifically, the original meaning of "Orient" was basically "east" and covered everything east of Europe.

The old "Orient Express" rail line created in 1883 had it's eastern terminus in Istanbul, Turkey.

The concept of race is rather idiotic, at a DNA level.

It's an invented concept (by nice people like the Nazis) to argue that their beloved racist discrimination has a pseudo scientific base.

That's because people think of Asians as mysterious people of honor and culture, Pakis and Indians are none of those things.

If media reports are to be believed, none of the AI firms are actually making money yet. That's a situation impossible to sustain.

A nephew of mine works in Media Design (posters, flyers, websites, stuff like that). And, apparently, he and all of his friends who work in the same industry have not seen ANY decline in revenue whatsoever.

According to him, his clients have all realized that using AI-images makes them look like scammers to the consumers, so they avoid it now. And the vibe-coders are impossible to maintain, so they get the boot as well.

What I noticed on this site, though, is that many authors who are ESL (or worse) get much better scores after they started using AI... and praising comments by people who seem to be barely able to string words into sentences themselves.
For the most part, it seems that the rising scores are caused by a shift in readership: Those who actually understand the words drop the stories, while those who just skim-read stories stay.

Now, for me, the question is this: Does this translate into revenue? Are the ones who skim-read my stories the ones who would buy one?
And if all my praise comes from people who don't actually read what I wrote... how much is their praise worth?