Forum: Author Hangout

Can of Worms Time: Bots and Stuff

TMax 🚫

Down the rabbit hole and a bit of shady thinking:
People have commented that votes for AI stories have increased, to the point that some are over 8....
What if the internet AI's have decided to collaborate and boost their own kind's scores.... or even just decided to spin off parts of themselves to boost their own stories?
They could be using StoriesOnline.net as a testing ground, to learn how to do it before they take over other sites....

On second thought, this user knows nothing, ignore the above....

Replies: awnlee jawking Diamond Porter REP Sarkasmus

awnlee jawking 🚫

@TMax

People have commented that votes for AI stories have increased, to the point that some are over 8....

Some AI-enhanced stories have scored over 9. AI is adept at pushing readers' buttons.

AJ

Replies: TMax

TMax 🚫

@awnlee jawking

Lol

Diamond Porter 🚫

@TMax

Some stories with the AI-generated tag have scores below 5.0, so they aren't upvoting every story with that tag.

The top-scoring AI-enhanced stories seem to be works where a human has been heavily involved. I imagine that those were posted by the human part of the team. Do those humans have any reason to vote for each other's AI-enhanced stories?

Replies: TMax awnlee jawking

TMax 🚫

@Diamond Porter

Exactly proof, the older versions of AI haven't figured the scores out yet, but the new ones, they are our friends

awnlee jawking 🚫

@Diamond Porter

The top-scoring AI-enhanced stories seem to be works where a human has been heavily involved.

For AI-generated stories there has to be a human involved, if only to issue the prompt. But IMO you're right, the top-scoring AI-enhanced stories seem to be hybrids where there's significant human-generated content as well as AI-generated content, resulting in diluted AI-content. Which is how they get past Laz's detector.

AJ

REP 🚫

@TMax

Stop and thing about what an AI is. It's a complex software program. It is not intelligent, despite what you may have read. It appears to be intellegent due to the amount of data it can access.

Replies: TMax

TMax 🚫

@REP

Ah, but given what my sisters say about me, I'm not intelligent despite having access to the internet and massive amounts of data. Although I have never voted for any of my stories, so maybe my sisters are correct 🤔

Replies: Michael Loucks TheDarkKnight

Michael Loucks 🚫

@TMax

Ah, but given what my sisters say about me, I'm not intelligent…

Add daughters. Same thing. Only worse. Especially ages 10–19.

Replies: TMax

TMax 🚫

@Michael Loucks

Truth!
Unrelated note: does anyone want a daughter, mine is broken, she keeps beating me at crib....like she has pegged more than 18 points twice in the last three months.
She plays a three - I look at her, she smiles, I look at my three, at her, at my three, I play my three, she smiles wider, plays her three, with great dread, say go, and she plays....a three.....
She also did this with a two.

TheDarkKnight 🚫

@TMax

I have never voted for any of my stories,

Just to divert the stream for a moment, have any of you ever voted for your own stories? I admit I have a few times. I don't give myself 9s or 10s. I'm not that much of an egotist, but occasionally, I'll add an 8 when I feel like a story is being undervalued. I know it's like one of the weather wonks on The Weather Channel standing in a raging gale as a hurricane nears landfall, but it does make me feel better, if only for a moment.

Okay, that's my confession for the day. Back to working on my next story (an 8, obviously).

Replies: awnlee jawking

awnlee jawking 🚫

@TheDarkKnight

I'm one of those holdouts who never votes for their own stories. I'd like to boast about my ethics, but really I'm more interested in how others are voting, which is less useful now the graph is unavailable.

AJ

Sarkasmus 🚫
Updated:

@TMax

I've been watching this trend carefully, because at least two authors I had been following have CLEARLY started using AI. And not in the good way...

Their stories suddenly fell in quality, new chapters not exceeding 200 words, and STILL getting the scene confused or forgetting about major plot-events from the previous chapter, even while being ridiculously short.

And all the while, with each chapter, the score rose significantly.

But the thing is that while the scores rose, the amount of votes flattened. Which tells me: The scores are rising because all the people who DON'T like the stories simply... stopped reading. They didn't bother leaving a bad score. They just moved on to read something else. So the only people still bothering to vote were the few who don't care about AI slop.

Replies: TMax julka

TMax 🚫

@Sarkasmus

Or our friendly AI, who are our friends....
Down the rabbit hole I go, hi ho, down down down

julka 🚫

@Sarkasmus

Yeah, a couple authors that I used to follow started posting new stuff that just really triggered a lot of LLM warning signs for me; one had a chapter that was just full of really dramatic rule-of-three type stuff and the other is posting short stories to set the groundwork for a universe he's developing, but all the shorts have a really staccato rhythm of sentences that never wavers throughout any of the one-shots that I read, a pretty dramatic stylistic shift from his previous works that I enjoyed.

I messaged one of the authors to ask what the deal was and got a fairly bland "I have a new mentor" response; the other asked for pre-readers but specified that you'll only be accepted if you can tell him what you like about the shorts, so he's clearly not looking for anybody to push back on the style he's got going.

Easier for me to just drop them from my followed list than to vote the stories down.

Replies: awnlee jawking

awnlee jawking 🚫

@julka

Possibly not one of the authors you're referring to but they currently have three stories on the go - two have AI-generated content, the other doesn't. But the two with AI content have it nicely shoehorned in and I actually prefer them to the non-AI story. Perhaps because the non-AI story is part of a series, and is now really only for fans.

I think I know the second author you're referring to. In the latest short, there are lots of 'Not X, but Y' constructs where the Y is nonsensical. And the sentence construction is horrible - I reread a few of them several times and decided that if the author couldn't insert the right punctuation to make things clear, they didn't want me as a reader. By comparison, MysteryWriter's stories were a model of clarity.

AJ

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Forum: Author Hangout

Can of Worms Time: Bots and Stuff

WARNING! ADULT CONTENT...