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AI RANT Following the cancellation of three major debut book deals over AI suspicions, I decided to put my own (needless to say, 100% human-written) prose to the test. My detector of choice was Originality AI, and the results proved to be jarring, to say the least. 🧵1/5

AI RANT (cont’d) The picture above isn’t a case of “false positives.” It’s a case of ALL sentences in a 300-word sample being classified as either ~100% AI- or ~100% human-written *depending on a single punctuation mark*. 🧵2/5

AI RANT (cont’d) Originality AI also offered me some “helpful” suggestions on how I could “improve” my style. These suggestions, along with my response to them as a two-time Nebula and one-time Compton Crook nominee, are displayed below. 🧵3/5

Are ai detectors just a way for ai companies to get fed new material legally, without needing an author's consent?

AI RANT (cont’d) AI slop machines excel at pattern matching, but what they can’t do for you is analyze the author’s _intent_. You hit them with too many sentence fragments or em dashes, and they’ll claim you’re AI; they have zero idea whether you really _meant_ it or not. 🧵5/5

I've had the em dash beaten into me through high school, lots of older books (like Lem) and then additionally through my university where Chicago Style was law. seeing people assume that using the em dash is a surefire, 100%, never-miss way to identify AI writing kills me inside every time.

Interesting that the publishers/editors can’t just read the copy and decided for themselves, but I guess that would take too much time. Slop machines are ok for them but not for anyone else I guess.

Per my other comment, Pangram was also the ONLY one mentioned in the two canceled book deals and the other major accusation. They're built in a completely different way, and I think it's really important to know of any examples of false positives there vs. the super explicitly scammy ones!

Hasn’t Pangram also gotten called out for false positives? Also even if it’s better, it doesn’t change the problem that if agents/publishers rely on “AI detection” products, given ALL products’ possibility of false positives they’re inevitably going to make false judgments that there’s genAI text

Oh originality is EXPLICITLY a massive scam/fraud. I told them they have basically built an em dash detector a year ago after a similar result (fully human-written chapter flagging as 90%+ AI, switching four natural em dashes to commas over 1,000+ words changed it by over 40%).

Yikes, Yare! This is both disturbing and annoying.

Absolutely--but at the same time, it's great to hear from you, Beth!

I think something that needs said as well is that they're slop machines that are guided initially by human intent. A HUMAN undoubtedly set up the training to make it highly suspicious of things like em dashes, because right now it's trendy to point to them as a signature of AI.